Goodbye to Sam Palmasano?

Well, finally Sam Palmisano is retiring as IBM CEO!  Good riddance!  This man following in his mentor's footsteps (Lou Gerstner) has done absolutely nothing to further IBM as an industry leader and has probably darn near destroyed any vestiges of industry leadership that IBM once may have had.

Under Sam's leadership, he has totally shifted the focus of IBM from hardware and software to consulting.  He has sold off the IBM Printing Division, the PC Division, was involved in eliminating the System i Division of the Systems and Technology Group!  He has been a huge advocate of IBM's ill defined Cloud venture!  His head is in the clouds, but IBM sure as heck can't figure it out.

How is that Amazon, Google, Oracle, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others have operational clouds and IBM is still talking about them? 

Take a close look at his replacement.  While it is interesting and very PC (politically correct) that he is being replaced by a woman, she (Virginia Rometty) is cut from the same cloth as good ole Sam.  She was responsible for integrating Coopers & Lybrand into IBM Global Services.  She was Sr VP Sales and Marketing most recently.  


If anyone has any doubt about the future of IBM i, this pretty much seals its death warrant and close the coffin.  Hell it may close the coffin on the IBM that we once new who helped commercial enterprises figure out and manage computer systems!