X-no-Archive:yes
It is a provocative piece.

To quote, with comments to follow:
It's another move to get all its salespeople working off the same page. This
past February, IBM quietly made changes to its 2,000-person large-server
sales force. The new marching order was to sell the entire server family and
eliminate the parochial fragmentation where you either sold one line or you
sold another.
...
And that has made for a startling transformation. I have to admit that I did
not think IBM would do as well as it has. In fact, when the big-iron makers
began getting serious about e-commerce a few years back, I thought
Hewlett-Packard had a better chance of understanding and exploiting the
Internet.

My mistake.

...the message here being that IBM delivers solutions, not just products.

...but Carleton Fiorina's biggest challenge remains: Will she be able to do
for HP what Lou Gerstner has done for IBM in the realm of e-commerce?

END-QUOTE

HP is supposed to "get all its salespeople working off the same page"; that
seems to be a good idea, although we are concerned that this page mention
MPE with offerings in the same category. Denys said over a year ago that HP
has to advertise itself as a solution provider, not a single product vendor.
His advise is still timely.

To start running a series of "what IBM just said" ads would be perhaps worse
than the current stealth campaign (does anyone know exactly how HP marketing
spent the $1000 they had budgeted?). At
http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?A2=ind0007D&L=hp3000-l&P=R20126, Gavin
wrote:

  Do we want Carly to say "we sell computers that run Unix, Windows, and
  MPE/iX" or do we want to hear "we sell computers that run Unix, Windows,
  Airlines, Credit Unions, HMOs, and Your Business(tm)"?  Hmmm, I like that:

     Sun: "We sell computers that run Unix!"
     Microsoft: "We sell computers that run Windows!"
     HP: "We sell computers that run your business."

I like it, too. e-commerce is not enough! (Heresy! Blasphemer!) E-commerce
is basically an interface, a facelift of sorts, and if it doesn't talk to
the existing (and therefore legacy) core systems that run your business,
it's like having a new receptionist answer our phones who doesn't know who
our customers are, or who we are, or what exactly it is we do here.

And there have to be no lack of interesting ad campaigns combining the ideas
the old and the new, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the ancient and the
modern. What does this make you think of? A grandparent and small child
playing together. "We're HP. We do the old. We invent the new...". A
volcanic island in the Pacific Rim, ancient and still forming, comes to my
mind.

Hey, Interex! How about a Contributed Advertising Library?

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
"Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven
is like the master of a household
who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
Matthew 13:52