IBM 1997 Annual Report Download - page 8

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market share and grow revenues
by 7 percent in constant currency.
We remained the biggest seller of
“ thin client” network computers.
More than 3,000 enterprise cus-
tomers purchased tens of thousands
of IBM Network Stations last year.
The award-winning IBM ThinkPad
continued as the leader in mobile
systems. And we introduced a
new line of Microsoft Windows
NT-based workstations in 1997, the
IBM IntelliStation.
•We continued to expand rapidly
in the world’s emerging markets —
though, like many other global
companies, we are being affected
by the financial turmoil in parts
of Asia. We announced plans to
expand our global network of
research laboratories by establishing
a new one — our eighth — in India.
In Hungary we pioneered a “ utility”
service for small- and medium-size
businesses — selling computing power
and applications via networks in the
same way water and electricity are
sold. We plan to roll it out in other
markets around the world.
THIRD, we were reminded of the
extraordinary resource we have in
IBM scientists and technologists — a
community of expertise and inventive-
ness no one can match. For the fifth
straight year, IBM led all companies in
U.S. patents — discoveries that are
building a foundation that will support
the company well into the future.
IBM people are delivering major
technological breakthroughs and getting
them to market faster than ever before.
In 1997 alone:
•Deep Blue — a specially programmed
RS/ 6000 SP supercomputer —
redefined the way humanity under-
stands its relationship to both
machines and thinking itself. It also
showed the world an IBM energized
by tackling “ grand” challenges —
beginning with taking on the
greatest grandmaster in chess
history, and now moving on to
pharmaceuticals, financial modeling
and weather forecasting.
•Our ViaVoice Gold continuous
speech recognition product brought
an exciting technology to a new level
of user-friendliness. It also poten-
tially opened the world of e-mail
and the Internet to a quarter of the
planet, through Mandarin ViaVoice.
•Lotus’s eSuite, introduced last fall,
is an entirely new approach in
personal productivity applications
that takes advantage of network-
based computing. Written entirely in
Java, eSuite applications, such as word
revenue
($ in billions)
93 94 95 96 97
94 95 96 97
62.7 64.1 71.9 75.9 78.5
(8.1)
93
3.0
4.2
5.4 6.1
6IBM1997annualreport
net earnings
($ in billions)