Wednesday, October 26, 2011

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IBM will get a new CEO

In my old company’s news: IBM has announced that Ginni Rometty will take over as President and CEO in January. From the IBM announcement:

Armonk, NY, October 25, 2011 — The IBM board of directors has elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of the company, effective January 1, 2012. She was also elected a member of the board of directors, effective at that time. Ms. Rometty is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

That Ms Rometty is IBM’s first female CEO is still remarkable, though IBM has long been more progressive than most large corporations in its promotion of women to executive positions, women such as Ellen Hancock, Linda Sanford, Jeannette Horan, Harriet Pearson, and Maria Azua have held Vice President positions in the company, and I watched some of them, including Ginni Rometty, move up from mid-level to Vice President during my time in IBM.

I have every expectation that Ms Rometty will be good for IBM, and I look forward to seeing how the company does under her leadership.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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It’s been a while

I’ve noted before that my high-school friend Bill Irwin found these pages some while go, and we’ve reconnected. Such are the benefits of social networks, including blogs, as well as, yes, Twitter and Facebook, if you can accept those. I’ve also noted that after five years of mostly daily blogging, I decided to back off starting in February, cutting back to every two or three days instead.

About a week and a half ago, Bill posted a comment to my most recent entry here. The entry is perhaps fittingly titled Don’t make promises... [you can’t keep]; fitting because my promise of two or three blog entries a week has not been kept — that most recent post is dated 7 September, and today is 25 October.

I didn’t publish Bill’s comment, because I wanted to promote it to a top-level entry. And note that it took me a week and a half to get to that. Here’s what he said:

Alright, Leiba, I’ve had enough. You inspired me to start out on my own blog and now you’ve stopped your own. Dammit, what gives? Gimme some feedback, dude, I don’t won’t to lose contact with you after all these many years...

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. First, I’ll say that anyone I’ve (re-)connected with through these pages will not be lost: you know how to contact me, I know how to contact you, and we can stay in touch.

That said, I do want to keep writing here, and I do intend to. It’s clear that once I gave up the discipline of daily, I lost the push to do it altogether; it’s been too easy to turn an every so often commitment into no commitment at all. I might have to re-think how I get motivated to post here. Because I do have a number of things set aside to say, but I haven’t made the time to say them.

And I won’t, probably, for the next few weeks either. I’ll try to get something out here and there, but I’m in the middle of a batch of (mostly business) travel. I was at the Internet Identity Workshop last week; I’m in Paris for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group this week. And the travels continue until I get back from the IETF meeting in Taipei on 18 November.

For now, I’ll post, below a panorama of the view from my hotel room, looking north from Montparnasse (click to enlarge). The major buildings are, left to right, Tour Montparnasse (Montparnasse Tower, the black office tower on the far left), Hôtel National des Invalides (the gold-dome, a military museum and hospital/residence for disabled veterans), Observatoire de Paris (the white dome), Basilique du Sacré Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica, on the hill in the far rear), Abbaye du Val de Grâce, and Hôtel du Panthéon (the domes in the foreground).

Paris panorama from Montparnasse