IBM 2001 Annual Report Download - page 23

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no. 6
We decided our products would
set the standard
NOT ON PLANET IBM, BUT ON PLANET EARTH
For a long time, we won with such consistency that we
started to look for another challenge. We began to compare
the performance of our products against our own prior gener-
ation, regardless of what our competitors were doing. By the
early ’90s, it was clear we were playing the wrong game.
So we stopped the internal benchmarks, and got serious
about winning against the best the marketplace had to offer.
That decision forced us to speed up, to bring new tech-
nologies to market on shorter and shorter cycles. And it also
triggered a chain reaction across the company
—
changing our
investment and acquisition strategies, our approach to market
analysis and the way we prioritize research efforts.
Today, we are the number 1 or number 2 company in
servers; collaborative software; custom logic; middleware; I/T
services; maintenance; Web software; high-end disk storage;
distributed application software; and total software.
It’s remarkable how much more you win when you’re in
the right game.