Word: ibm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...IBM, for one, couldn't agree more. In 2004, Big Blue launched five different wellness efforts aimed at getting its employees to work out more, lose weight, eat better, quit smoking and heed preventive medical advice. The company, which also has a program designed to encourage healthy habits in employees' children, has spent about $130 million on wellness so far, much of that in the form of cash rewards of up to $300 per employee annually for good behavior. Doris Gonzalez, 50, a senior program manager in corporate affairs at IBM's Armonk, N.Y., headquarters, now walks 20 minutes...
...IBM developed its own program, but some companies are hiring outsiders. Packaging and specialty-chemical giant MeadWestvaco, for instance, chose Virgin HealthMiles, a Richard Branson brainchild, to design a wellness regimen centered on pedometers, which count employees' steps. The pedometers are linked to a computer system that converts the steps into "healthmiles" - points that can be exchanged for up to $500 a year in cash or gift cards from merchants like Target and Bed Bath & Beyond. "You look out the window here at lunchtime and see people with pedometers on, walking all over the place," says Greg Williams, the company...
...shares of Google and IBM have handily outperformed those of all the other large tech companies based in the U.S. such as Hewlett Packard (HPQ), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Oracle (ORCL). Each of the companies is blessed with substantial earnings and technology staffs in the tens of thousands. But, the firms are not all viewed the same, at least by investors who trade tens of millions of their shares each...
...most ways, IBM and Google are not like one another at all. IBM makes its money selling expensive hardware, client services, and software to companies, most of which are very large, and to governments. Google has millions of customers who pay nothing to use its services. It has millions of advertisers who spend money to reach people who look at search results and most of these marketers are very small. (See pictures of Google Earth...
...What the companies do have in common is a willingness to take risks, probably risks with long odds in order to launch new products. These products may be failures, but they are well enough researched and designed that they have a good chance of keeping IBM and Google ahead of the competition even if that does not immediately involve significant new revenue...