John Lamb's Week: Battle of the dinosaurs

Whatever the truth of this there's no doubt that fulfilment - the art of making up, dispatching and delivering customer orders - has gone from being a corporate backwater to the stuff of high level management debate.

So it comes as no surprise that over the next two days customer conscious new economy executives will be gathered at The Hatton hotel in London to tackle the key issues posed by e-fulfilment. Getting fulfilment right is critical for business success, says the organiser, SMi.

Ecommerce has had the effect of focusing attention on a number of other previously unglamorous business functions. Supply chain management has gone from being a matter of keeping track of purchase orders and delivery notes to a key element in internet-enabled business.

Similarly, procurement has been wrested from the hands of fuddy duddy buying departments and transformed by business exchanges into an activity that can not only deliver massive cost savings, but is a business in its own right. Who would have thought that General Motors and other car companies might regard procurement as an activity that could rival their own core businesses?

No one talks of translation anymore. Now companies with global aspirations must put localisation at the top of their agenda as they seek to sell their goods and services worldwide. It is the same story with customer service.

The kind of thinking that led Avis to insist its staff pick up a phone before it rang three times has been left behind by software packages that identify who the customer is before the phone is answered, retrieves their file and tells the agent what to say.

Some years ago a UK publication staged a debate at the Oxford Union between IBM and Microsoft that posed the question 'Is the mainframe dead?' After a knockabout session the key debaters from Microsoft handed copies of their then-latest Dinosaurs CD to their opponents.

IBM might well be tempted to return the compliment this Thursday when Microsoft announces its second quarter figures. These days Microsoft is looking increasingly like the Big Blue dinosaur of the early nineties.

Beset by anti-trust legislation, defending what looks like a cash cow product strategy and failing to maintain a decisive presence at the leading edge of technology is just the sort Jurassic scenario that did for IBM.

Microsoft has already issued a profit warning. Revenues for the year are expected to hit $25bn, only a nine per cent rise on last year's $22.96bn, missing analysts' expectations by five or six per cent for its second fiscal quarter.

At the heart of Microsoft's problems is slowing growth in the PC business and increasing reluctance by customers to endure the upheaval involved in moving from one operating system to another.

Figures from PC Data in the US show that retail PC sales actually declined last year. And while plenty of boxes will be shipped around the globe this year, there is no denying that desktop systems are no longer the centre of attention.

It is going to be increasingly tough for Microsoft to hang on to its cash cow when the game is moving to internet-based thin client systems that need communications bandwidth and open standards rather than an operating system.

IBM won the Oxford Union mainframe debate, but it did not win the commercial battle. Can Microsoft avoid becoming a dinosaur too?