Spotted whilst reading “Hooked on Google” on SiliconValley.com:
“Google is the next Microsoft because Microsoft is the next IBM” Stephen Arnold author of ‘The Google Legacy’.
Everyone’s been spotting similarities between today’s Google and Microsoft a few years back. But I agree Microsoft is slowly becoming IBM like – and that’s not necessarily a good thing for them.
BTW: Someone who works for an IBM partner recently told me IBM only has around 4000 clients worldwide! I couldn’t believe that but he was pretty adamant about the numbers.
Sure, those 4000 may be generally high value-contracts, but the ‘churn factor‘ must be concerning. Consulting projects come to the end of their natural life, clients run out of money and rival companies poach contracts.
Disclosure: As per my disclosure policy please be aware I have been doing some on/off consultancy for a Microsoft project recently.
well, think about the top 2000 largest companies in the world. Almost all will be multi-nationals, and most will be be being sold multiple IBM “things” (Mainframes, servers, consultnacy, networking, software etc).
Also, just because a single consultancy contact ends, does not mean that another one has not already started with a different department within the same company. One thing that IM´BM consultants could bring was a knowledge of how different divisons of a company are working to each other.