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A few months ago, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner was quoted as saying that the last thing IBM needs is vision. He was being disingenuous, I think. Every company needs a vision, which is just another way of saying that a company needs to know what business it's in and how it wants to conduct that business. And Gerstner seems like a smart enough guy to know that IBM really does need to define its business. His problem at the time was that he couldn't talk about IBM's vision, because it was still being worked out.
Last week, Gerstner elevated the guy --Jim Cannavino, who has been developing that vision for IBM on an informal basis--into the formal job of the chief strategy guy for the company. Cannavino has gone around the company and developed support for a plan to merge all of the company's computing platforms--ES/9000, AS/400, RS/6000, and PS/2--around a single set of technologies, namely the PowerPC microprocessor, the Workplace OS operating system, and the Taligent object model, along with a series of open standards for cross-platform development, network interoperability, etc.
Now IBM needs to talk about this transition without also telling its customers to stop buying all the products it is already selling. Tough problem. Very little of the new platform that IBM is developing will be ready for mission-critical deployment until 1995 or 1996. So the company has to dance hard for two and maybe three years to keep already disaffected customers on board.