RE: IBM

I apologize for being slow to answer this. When Gary Stimac came up for the National/Cyrix meeting on Tuesday we had 15 minutes with just the 2 of us talking at the end. He said that Gerstner wants to move Palmasino "up" and hire someone to run the IBM PC company. Gary is being offered the job. He has decided to consult to IBM with Mike Swavely between now and the end of the year. He is intrigued by the job but wants to make sure that he would be empowered to succeed. He would view it as a 5 year assignment and maybe the last big job he would take. He is worried about the quality of the team and whether IBM's relationship with Microsoft would be a problem. I told him the JAVA religion coming out of the software group is a big problem. I said IBM refused to big anything related to Backoffice. I said they continue to use their PCs to distribute things against us. I said they are dabbing in NCs in a way we don't like. I was fairly encouraging to him though because I am sure it would help us work with IBM PC company A LOT for him to be there. Overall we will never have the same relationship with IBM that we have with Compaq, Dell and even HP because of their software ambitions. I could deal with this just fine if they weren't such rabid JAVA backers. We are told they have funded Netscape to do the browser without email and they are proposing to fund Netscape to give their browser away. They have also funded a lot of SUN stuff. To make the relationship with the PC guys work some of this rehetoric would have to be toned down. We can't do pulbic things with them when the whole IBM message seems to be "JAVA will save the world. Do what SUN tells you and get rid of mainframes and everything else including Microsoft using JAVA". I am willing to take some risk in improving the relationship and think you should approach them on steps for improvement. You should not position it as "overnight we will treat you like Compaq". We should position it as lets do some things that are good for both of us but which require some of the rhetoric to be lowered on both sides. On their side I mean JAVA and NC. See answers below.