Giant IBM is pitching to join Netscape and Microsoft as a force on the Internet (see the Sept. 16 Business Week story, "The New I-Way Hog: IBM"). So BW's guest on Oct. 3 was Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of IBM's Internet Div. and its chief Net strategist. He was online with the author of the BW story, Computers Editor Ira Sager. The moderator was Bob Arnold, editor of BW Online and senior editor of the magazine.
Here's a sample from the transcript:
BobABW: Mkeogh wants to know...
Question: How would you describe IBM in the year 2010?
IrvingWB: That is a very tough question, given how fast the world is moving, but my hope is that we continue to be leaders in providing the most advanced applications, systems, and technologies to our customers in the year 2010. Now, the fascinating question is what those applications will be. I think they will be a lot more intelligent in the sense that they will manipulate a lot, a lot more information, and will perform all kinds of searches, data-mining, and generally extracting intelligence from the data. I think that visual interactions, images, and video will become much more important because our brains are wired to interact visually. I think that we will truly be universally connected in the sense that just about everyone will be connected with computers, much as just about everyone has telephones and TV today.
