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Big Blue is wearing a Red Hat.
It's hard to know why IBM CEO Ginni stepped down this week. Was she forced out, did she leave voluntarily, perhaps setting up her next act as a cabinet secretary? Or was it simply an age thing? Rometty's 62, which isn't very old. But her two legendary predecessors, Louis Gerstner and Sal Palmisano, stepped aside at 60, as IBM tradition dictates. What is clear is that Rometty has moved the company away from its dying legacy businesses, and closer to a cloud-computing, AI-centric future. But they're not quite there yet, and it must surely be frustrating to her that she won't be the one to get them over the finish line (if indeed they make it there).
The new CEO will be Arvind Krishna, who seems the polar opposite of Rometty. While they are both engineers by training, Krishna seems a quieter, less polished executive. But a brilliant technologist he is, and he was responsible for IBM's biggest and most important acquisition of the cloud-computing company Red Hat. While Rometty used her considerable charisma to become one of the most recognizable CEOs in America, it seems unlikely that Krishna will be as visible. It seems to some that he may be a caretaker CEO for Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst, who was named IBM's president. Krishna is 57, and can keep the trains running for a few years while Whitehurst, 52, masters the intricacies of Big Blue.
Of course, one big downside to all this is that we're down to just 7 female CEOs in the Fortune 100. Here's hoping that the (near) future of work includes a reversal of this backwards trend.
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