lou's last word
April 11, 2002
the latest IBM annual report reads, predictably, like a breathless encomium to Lou Gerstner. but aside from the inevitable lurches towards revisionist history (news alert: the mainframe market isn't quite dead ... yet), this is actually a pretty eloquent piece of puffery.
my former colleagues Jon Iwata, Mike Wing and Terry Yoo are a demi-legendary annual report team - they seem to take home one of those gold or silver AR awards just about every year - and i would put odds on for them to do it again this year. this is quite simply one of the best-written pieces of corporate blurbmanship I have ever read.
my main beef is that the Web version comes across as something of an afterthought, especially when compared with the beautifully designed print book. there was a time when IBM would put a fairly extravagant effort into its online annual report. I was surprised to just discover they've yanked down all the old versions of the interactive annual reports, replacing them all with PDFs... I guess in our new era of tech industry chasteness, it's back to shovelware for corporate communications on the Web.
p.s. the ink was probably still drying just about the time those nasty Enron-ish rumors started hammering IBM's stock price, just a scant few weeks after Lou's final sayanora
File under: Books
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