Got my copy of the IBM annual report in the mail yesterday – as always, a beautiful piece of work – the cover is especially trippy this year. Anyone who opts to receive it electronically is really missing out. Anyways, paging through it I wondered “How is my old friend IBM Workplace doing in the marketplace?”. This paragraph indicates they doubled their revenue during the year:
Lotus software revenue increased as clients continue to demonstrate strong response to the Domino version 7 product line, as well as very high interest in Workplace software. Workplace software more than doubled its revenue in 2005 versus 2004. (page 30)
Well that sounds awesome! Doubling is good, right? That must mean Lotus revenue is through the roof! Lets see… Hmm, this is interesting: page 33 says Lotus revenue grew 1.6 percent
and page 35 says Lotus software revenue increased 3 percent
. I guess it needs to redouble a couple more times before we can say its setting the world on fire.
As an aside, I think its also interesting that mainframe shipments are measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second) growth year over year. I might just be grossly underinformed, but it seems to me the number of MIPS a contemporary computer can do is always growing at some double digit clip year to year, so even selling the same number of computers, assuming Moore’s law holds, you’ll have 100% MIPS growth every 18 months.
The spring restructuring actions
, of which I was a lucky participant, cost the company a $65 million one-time charge.