IBM 1999 Annual Report Download - page 11

education are all profoundly affected by this onrush.
In most cases, our technology is at once a threat
and an important part of the solution.
The implications are clear. Our industry has a
very limited opportunity to step up to these
imperatives and demonstrate responsible
leadership. Just as we are entitled to ask our public
institutions to adjust to a world that runs at Web
speed, so the information industries themselves
must learn to define their ambitions with the
broadest constituency – and longest time frame –
in mind. The business of e-business is not the
IPO; it’s the future. At IBM, that’s how we’re
shaping our business decisions and our actions
in the ever-more-essential arena of Internet-driven
public policy.
* * *
There has never been a headier time to run a
business – or a more challenging one. For all its
fluctuations, though, I find myself more optimistic
than I have been in my seven years at IBM – and
that optimism has been deepened by three lessons
of 1999.
First, the global economy has proven a lot more
resilient than many of the doomsayers predicted.
A networked world, it turns out, cushions rather than
amplifies local downturns.
Second, technology and technology profes-
sionals came through the challenge of Y2K with
flying colors (including tens of thousands of
IBMers who exemplified our company at its very
best in the way they helped our customers and our
own company through this challenge). A year
ago, a severe backlash against technology in the
wake of Y2K seemed likely. Going forward, people
will probably feel confident in I/T’s ability to survive
even the severest of threats.
But the biggest reason for my feeling of optimism
about IBM’s prospects is the change in IBM itself.
In identifying and defining e-business, we have
created a huge, entirely new kind of market for our
goods, services and expertise – and we are
stepping up to an entirely new set of challenges.
We are reshaping our own company into a
fundamentally different enterprise, what Business
Week magazine recently called “The Biggest
Dot.Com of Them All.”
I don’t make predictions. Even with 1999’s
uncertainties largely behind us, our industry, our
economy, the developments in technology and the
shape of the emerging global culture remain far too
dynamic to predict outcomes. But I am certain of
one thing that 2000 holds in store for IBM. This year
we will attack our remarkable opportunities with a
new level of aggressiveness.
Watch this space.
09
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer