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IBM “thought leader” and Executive VP of Innovation and Technology, Nicholas Donofrio says so:
“The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It’s not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things,” Donofrio said.
“If you’re looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There’s no such thing as the next big thing,” he added.
Hmm, that sounds like the old one about closing the patent office because there is nothing left to invent or the story told about famous physicist Max Planck:
“..The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised him against going into physics, saying, “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.”
There’s no need to worry though – the article relates that IBM has some alternatives to the “next big thing” which seem to be along the lines of doing the same old stuff, but describing it differently with larger words and in bigger meetings.
PC World’s Harry McCracken was doing a little spring cleaning and happened upon a copy of Microsoft Bob. What to do? Why get it running on Windows XP of course! The good news is:
For the record, the package screams–if that’s the word I want–on a 1.7-GHz Athlon XP system with a gig of RAM and GeForce2 graphics.
and the bad news is it’s Bob:
It manages to be a bad idea (it seems to be aimed at a six-year-old who has personal finances to manage) executed even more badly than you’d expect (even in 1995, I suspect the profusion of inexplicable “boing!”-type sound effects would have been annoying). The whole thing is kind of spellbinding, at least if you’re not trying to do real work with it.
More hilarity and plenty of screenshots by following the link. It’s hard to believe that it was only 11 years ago that Bob and the the animated “assistants” made their appearance or that the assistants still exist in Windows XP and Office.
I’m an IBM alumnus and know well that they have some very talented people, but you have to wonder if the powers that be will ever “get” the SMB market. Robert McMillan at InfoWorld:
IBM plans to ship a new version of its Tivoli Identity Manager software designed for small to medium-sized businesses.
Tivoli Identity Manager Express will be a slimmed-down version of the product that can be used by a maximum of 5,000 users, said Joe Anthony, a Tivoli program director with IBM.
Identity Manager is typically used by very large companies to manage user names and passwords and audit user activity. The Express version will have less customization features than its enterprise counterpart, but it will also be easier to install and manage, Anthony said. “It’s a single DVD. It installs on a single server in less than two hours.”
