If any IBM Corp top brass offers you unsolicited investment advice on companies in its field, ignore it: this is the company that rejected the opportunity to take a stake in Microsoft Corp when it could have been had for pennies, held 16% of MCI Communications Corp and sold it, had over 20% of Intel Corp and sold it (those stakes would have gone a long way to solve its cash problems now) – and then in the late 1980s and early 1990s bought stakes of between 10% and 20% of a whole army of software firms and is now in process of selling them all – at the same time as it is talking about buying two or three other software companies (CI No 2,450).
