When is a monitor not a monitor? When it’s an e-business tool. Yes, once again our friends over at IBM Corp’s marketing machine are spinning the light fantastic by attaching the fifth letter of the alphabet to a set of new products in the hope that we won’t notice that it’s just a bunch of new Intel-based servers, workstations, desktops, laptop computers as well as a new set of, yes, monitors. And be prepared for a worldwide advertising onslaught to accompany this campaign. Up until now IBM says it has not perhaps been entirely clear what it meant by e-business. Too right. But now we know, it is the things you have been using all along to get on the internet. And so it is spending $100m on a year-long campaign starting next week in newspapers beginning with the line The work matters. The people matter. The tools matter. For all our cynicism, which we readily acknowledge and cultivate, IBM is clearly on to something – at least in the world in which advertising executives live that is – because rivals Hewlett- Packard Co and Compaq Computer Corp have already paid the company the compliment of trying to co-opt the e-business umbrella term for their product. And that’s after HP derided IBM publicly for its e-based marketing strategy (CI No 3,372). But we’re still left wondering who the real e-tool is? The PC I’m writing this on, or the person in marketing who thought that everything should start with an ‘e’?
