The IT establishment is dressing in new clothes

“WE ARE AIBMAIVMIBM different company now. We are no longer focused just on mobile. And we have the numbers to back it up.” Cristiano Amon, the boss of Qualcomm, which makes chips mostly for smartphones, is emphatic when he describes what he will tell Wall Street at the firm’s investor day on November 16th. He is in good company. Some of the other famous members of a previous generation of big-tech firms (Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and ) have recently met investors to explain how they intend to stay relevant in the age of cloud computing and artificial intelligence ().There is action as well as words. On November 1st Dell spun off ware, a big software-maker; later in the week floated much of its professional-services business. The tech old guard hope to reinvent themselves, much as Microsoft has done in recent years in spectacular fashion.