Moving

Photo: the new Plaza IBM

In the morning I will walk into the company's new premises for our main office in Malaysia. After 20 years, we bid goodbye to the icon of Taman Tun Dr. Ismail. We carry the building name and will create a new icon now in Bandar Utama.

Moving is exciting. I wanted to connect that with the speculation from Jeff Kaplan on which country would be next to move to ODF adoption! Jeff is from the Open ePolicy Group at Harvard which produced the seminal Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems.

Jeff is not certain that it'll be Italy who's next to move to ODF. (What? Italy? I'm still sore they beat France in the World Cup final, and now their domestic football scene is a mess...) But it is interesting to see Jeff wonder if the next country could come from Asia -- either South Korea or Malaysia! Sam Hiser from the OpenDocument Foundation commented to Jeff, "My Asian guess would be S. Korea, but I feel Asia is dark with regard to ODF so am not as confident of what's going on there."

Aahh..., Malaysia... it's up to us now!

Comments

[nothing better]

Sigh... It's just another icon for IBM (Idiot Become Manager). Nothing so special about it. A 100+ years company with just about the same market capital (117.93B)compare to those startup like Google (120.93B). So you still call them a great company? Sucks!

[Hasan: This blog accepts comments without need for blog-owner approval, except for comments containing certain obscene words. But in future I may delete comments like this one after it gets published. It's not so much because of the invalid email address, but the comment is almost deragatory and doesn't add much interest to a blog discussion. I say "almost" because I don't take offense in this case; in fact I'm amused.]

[Rizal]

This "nothing better" fella is precisely that - nothing better!

If he's so good why doesn't he apply for the position of IBM CEO and take the company forward?

As a former IBMer, I have to say that there's a lot of bad things about IBM (which is why I left), but after working for numerous other MNCs I came to realize that there are many good things about IBM too (I wont get into that here - too long of a story for this short post).

Besides, market capitalization is only one measure of a company's success and not necessarily the most accurate one. By definition, market cap = stock price x number of shares. Google is the darling of Wall Street and one can argue that its stock price doesn't reflect its real value.

Remember the dot com craze? I was in the US when the bubble blew up (it didn't burst, it went kaboom!) and I remember companies with market cap in the millions because of their over-inflated stock prices go belly up because they didn't have good products, good management, or good strategy. IBM has been around for so long because MOST of its products are good, MOST of its management are good, and MOST of the strategy is good.

IBM has a rich history of developing technology and helping businesses and governments in countries all over the world. From my point of view as a Malaysian, an IT professional and a manager, all Google has is a website (albeit a damn good one!).

[Hasan]

Rizal, cool! And I'll stick around in IBM a while yet.

Meantime, about two-and-a-half-months after moving to the new Plaza IBM, a couple of exciting things have happened in the last few days:

(1) the building now has the IBM logo! Gaze up on the LDP Highway side. And notice the former Plaza IBM in Taman Tun Dr. Ismail has a new logo - VADS.

(2) The "IBM Innovation Center" for Business Partners was officially launched yesterday, on the 15th floor. See a description of it here: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/isv/spc/kualalumpur.html
Look out for news on this "IBM Innovation Center" for Business Partners in the local press over the next couple of weeks and also in this blog soon.