3Com leadership grapples with going from good to great

So while Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy and - to lesser extent - Bill Gates vied with each other to deliver the most outlandish insults, the unassuming and reflective Benhamou quietly got on with his job. And in terms of providing the building blocks for corporate computing based on PC architectures he was equally influential.

Benhamou was the boss of 3Com throughout the 1990s, and for the first half of the decade he could do no wrong. In an era of client/server computing his networking company provided the nuts and bolts that linked client to server.

The company's current troubles can be traced to their biggest triumph, the 1997 acquisition of US Robotics. At a time when its major competitors were preparing to move up the corporate computing food-chain, 3Com moved down.

It may seem strange now but at that time 3Com (current market cap: $6.3bn) and Cisco (current market cap: $416.6bn) were considered equals.

Granted, the subsequent success of the Palm Pilot was there for all to see but USR brought with it managerial and integration headaches as well as modem technology whose days were numbered.

Since the turn of this year, 3Com has set about repairing some of the damage. Crucially, the Palm division was sold off (with Benhamou as chairman) allowing some semblance of balance to return to the company's priorities.

Given the general aversion to technology stocks in 2000, it is something of an achievement that 3Com's share price today stands higher than it did in January. Some analysts attribute this relatively good form not to Benhamou but to Bruce Claflin, COO throughout that period.

Come January 2001, Claflin will have the opportunity to prove he is more than just an operations man. If he can show the managerial and strategic acumen Benhamou showed - at least in the first half of his reign - Claflin should do fine.