Before I joined IBM, Ian was saying that most people didn’t understand how big IBM actually was. I thought that Microsoft was a large company because it had something like 50-70k employees, but that’s dwarfed by IBM’s 350k. If Microsoft has a campus, then IBM has a town. Organizationally, they are both similar. Microsoft was broken into various sub-companies: Windows, Office, MSN, Home & Entertainment etc., (but apparently now they’ve re-org’d to 3 divisions). IBM is similar in that it is basically three companies: Software Group, Global Services and Hardware.

Anyways, you know a company is big that when you call its internal help desk, you get forwarded off to India and have to navigate a maze of menus. I think IBM is so large, that their internal help desk is like a help desk for Microsoft.