EMC Corp, Hopkington, Massachusetts has been widely seen on Wall Street as an accident waiting to happen, but that was because too many on the Street still believe IBM Corp’s own publicity. The biggest failure so far in Louis Gerstner’s tenure has been his inability to do anything to speed up the decision-making process within IBM and make it nimbler, and as a result, whenever IBM has lumbered up to try to steamroll EMC, EMC has nimbly side-stepped it. As a result, EMC, reporting third quarter figures, was able to say that it is on track for earnings and revenue growth of over 25% for 1996 and it is now largely immune from short-term IBM-inspired squalls – it expects to win $750m in 1996 from open systems business.
