Even when the NEXT BIG THING shouts right in its face IBM is often characteristically oblivious to it. Remember PC? Remember Relational database? Both were originally brain children of IBM but adopted by Bill & Larry right after their birth. More recently, when BEA announced ESB (enterprise server bus) product a paper immediately appeared on IBM's site claiming ESB is not really a product you can buy. It was slightly entertaining to observe IBM scrambling to come up with its own equivalent of ESB a few months later. Obviously, when someone is obsessed with cheap labor on a sub-continent (isn't "service" just another way of saying outsourcing these days?), you certainly cannot expect him to come up with anything truly innovative.