Behaving like a company whose oil tanker just wiped out the wildlife of half the Pacific coast after running aground and rupturing its tanks, IBM Corp is seeking to restore its image by calling in the spin doctors and running two-page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and 10 other publications, posing the question What’s really going on at IBM? and answering it with an apologia for all the bad press its announcements have generated – but the campaign has got off to a poor start: even before the first ad appeared, Bob Djurdjevic of Annex Research had told the Times if the IBM board thinks they can PR themselves out of the downward spiral the company is in, then they’re going to be in for a rude surprise; computer superflack Regis McKenna added it takes five or 10 miles to turn an aircraft carrier, and we live in an age of speedboats.
