IBM boss Virginia Rometty has taken to her web cam to blast her besuited staff who are "too slow.” Rometty sent off a five-minute internal video message which was so grumpy they did her the favour of sending it to the Wall Street Journal. She moaned at the company's sales staff for failing to get ink on the page for a number of potential deals.

"As the quarter ended, hundreds of millions of dollars of software and mainframe opportunities, they didn't close and that was because we didn't move fast enough," she snarled.

Rometty said that in at least one case IBM was too slow to understand the value and then engage on the approval and the sign-off process and it didn’t get done. If a client were to have any requests or questions in the future, IBM had better have a response ready within a day.

"And if anything slows you down, call it out. Engage management, engage leadership and let's deal with it," she growled. She has already given her "under-performing" storage crew a dressing down and said she will be taking "substantial actions" to sort out that area of its business and Rometty has also switched the head of corporate strategy with the head of systems and technology in a bid to shake things up.

But on the plus side, she confessed that her strategy was "the right one" and "fundamentals are strong". So in other words she is right and those lazy suits are wrong. Big Blue missed its first quarter targets after expected income from mainframe systems and related software deals, along with patent licences, had to be rolled over into the second quarter.