Arnie Berman Ibm Quotations

IBM was one of many companies that were good at managing expectations in a period where investors were conditioned to expect earnings surprises.

IBM is one of these big bellwether companies where their business is so solid that in a year like 2001, where everybody was missing, IBM never missed a quarter.

HP's problems with services are not uncommon. IBM has had issues like that, too, of late. The larger problem with tech today (Friday) and in the last month has been that improvement in semiconductor capital equipment, like Applied Materials, doesn't transfer over to the rest of the tech sector. While tech fundamentals are turning, the evidence of that has been slow coming.

So far it looks good. It looks as though IBM is the company that has the right solutions set for some time now.

In terms of the kind of hurdle that Microsoft and IBM have to leap over, the kind of growth they have to deliver is not as significant a bar as it is for Intel.

The first quarter was so brutal for technology spending that even IBM missed the number and chose to lower the bar. But here you have an example of a company that's very big and whose results were not, in any respect, worse than expected.