Word: gerstner
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...last week Gerstner, 53, proved his company was really serious about getting with it: he moved to seize control of Lotus Development Corp. and its Notes software program, one of the fastest-growing parts of the $100 billion desktop-computing industry. In an unprecedented step for Big Blue, Gerstner launched a hostile bid to acquire Lotus for $3.3 billion, or $60 a share, more than twice the price at which the stock had been trading. At the same time, IBM went to court to challenge a Lotus "poison pill" that would make a takeover prohibitively expensive and appealed to Lotus...
...ever be cool? until last week, the evidence was slim. Yes, company chairman Louis Gerstner urged employees when he arrived two years ago to dispense with formality and send him their thoughts via E-mail. Then he instituted a dress-down policy and had IBM take out 50,000 subscriptions to Wired magazine, the chronicler of online culture. This year he paid for irreverent TV spots, including one showing one Czech nun telling another that IBM's OS/2 Warp software "sounds pretty...
That would give Gerstner an ideal weapon for challenging industry giant Microsoft, which dominates most other parts of the desktop software business. Not only would IBM reap increasing revenues from sales of Notes, but other software companies could use it as a "platform" on which to build their own programs and thereby turn it into a global standard. "In this industry he who is first garners an enormous amount of benefit," Gerstner says. But Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who plans to roll out a groupware program called Exchange later this year, dismissed the IBM-Lotus alliance. "I just...
...Boston bureau chief Sam Allis says the deal's biggest surprise lay in IBM's decision to retain Lotus chief executive Jim Manzi. "Everybody figured that he had to go -- that you cannot have a strong personality representing the old company," Allis says. But he says IBM chief Louis Gerstner recognized the move was necessary to maintain the allegiance of key brains at Lotus -- espcially Ray Ozzie, the creator of the lucrative Lotus Notes program that mayhelp IBM challenge software behemoth Microsoft...
...togain back lost ground in the high-tech world, IBM announced a $3.3 billion hostile takeover bid for Lotus Development Corp., maker of the popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and other software. "Together, our skills match in a way that is breathtaking," IBM's chairman and CEO Louis Gerstner told a news conference. (Lotus, the third-largest PC software company after Microsoft and Novell, rejected IBM's buyout suggestions during five months of private talks, but today said it would consider the $60 per share cash offer, which amounts to twice its market value.)TIME senior technology editor Philip...