The American Spectator

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In my opinion, Mr. Craig draws a wrong conclusion from the history of IBM and ignores its current marketing message.

IBM maintained a solid leadership in personal computers as long as it adhered to open standards: IBM PC, XT, and AT were the pacesetters and bestsellers of their day. IBM lost this leadership when it attempted to lock the market with proprietary architectures of PS/2 and MicroChannel and with its OS/2, a $1.2 billion flop.

IBM has survived as a respectable business only because the Internet age forced it to support open standards that allowed its PCs, midrange and mainframes, to talk to each other. That lesson apparently has not been lost on them: IBM has not advertised its proprietary midrange iSeries for two years now but its ads and TV commercials promote open source LINUX. (TV commercials also promote WebSphere; however, by selling WebSphere IBM in fact sells its consulting services.)

p>Microsoft and Intel became leaders because they did not think and behave like IBM. IBM is now borrowing pages from their playbook. br> — Jan Machat /p> p> OUT OF LUCK br> Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s Luck Be a Lady : /p> p>I think Mr. Bennett is the new Dixie Chicks, Pee Wee Herman, Michael Jackson, etc. He depends on the “public” liking, admiring, agreeing with him. But I think he will lose many of those backers in the future because their perception of him will be altered. I for one say ho hum. For a long time I considered him gutless. Anyone who would defend a brother like “Bob” during the impeachment process is