Millions of dollars would have been wiped off the value of IBM Corp’s Integrated Systems Solutions Co yesterday if it had been a separately-quoted company after IBM got the old one-two from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal over the disastrous inability of the computer systems it has paid so dearly to install at the Atlanta Olympiad to deliver on all the promises – and managed to make matters even worse by making excuses. Everything worked perfectly at Barcelona with the old mainframe-style and OS/2 systems, but IBM’s attempts to rally Internet and intranet technologies have proved less than perfect; These are start-up problems, blustered Jeff Cross, a spokesman for IBM to the New York Times, This is the largest sporting event in the world – equivalent to a NASA space shot or two Super Bowls a day for 17 days; there are some legitimate start-up problems that people are working 24 hours a day to address. It’s doing the computers for the Winter Olympics in 1998, so perhaps it will have really got the system sorted for the Sydney Millennium Games.
