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[PC Week Online] October 9, 1996 3:00 PM ET IBM on the Internet computer: Coming soon By Lisa Dicarlo

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ORLANDO, Fla.-IBM's top brass, including chairman and CEO Louis Gerstner, gathered here today to give CIOs a peek into the decision-making process for products and standards.

The only specific product news to come out of the conference today is the near-term release of IBM's Inter-Personal Computer, now called the LCC (LAN Controlled Client), said Robert Stephenson, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Personal Computer Co., in an interview.

The Armonk, N.Y., company already has several hundred customized systems in place for markets such as banking, insurance and automotive.

The systems out today are based on Intel Corp. processors, but the LCC can run any processor, Stephenson said.

"What we've learned from that initial [pilot program] will go into the follow-on-the LCC," Stephenson said. "It will be a sealed box design so you can't take anything out or put anything in, and it will be completely controlled by the server via software," he said.

Gerstner said the initiative may reduce the overall cost of PC management by 50 percent to 75 percent.

In an effort to convince customers that it will deliver only products, services and standards that customers want, Gerstner said that IBM now "kills projects a lot faster than we used to," adding that of 100 projects on the R&D budget for 1997, less than half will become products in that time frame.

Neither Gerstner nor other IBM executives specified which projects were shelved, but he held up some discontinued application software as an example.

"When I got [to IBM in 1993], we were losing so much money on some application software that I'd be embarrassed to tell you," Gerstner said.

Virtually no product is developed today without some level of input from IBM customers, including forthcoming speech technology for PCs, which he characterized as "very, very serious."

Gerstner seemed enthusiastic about the promise of using World Wide Web browsers as an agnostic environment to run applications.

"Maybe, for once, we will create the ability for platform-independent applications to run on any computer, but there is one player who doesn't like the idea of the browser as a platform scenario," he said.

He also took the opportunity to downplay the browser war between Microsoft Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp.

"Forget about browsers. It's the beginning-not the end-of networking, and it's just a subject to sell magazines and newspapers," Gerstner said.

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