Does what it says on the tin
We moved on to O'Sullivan's role within the company, starting by asking what brought her over to the UK. She heads up the commercial product division and was in London for an annual enterprise customer advisory council. "They help us design what our next products are going to be," she said.
"I started in the personal computers division of IBM in 1983, so almost the very beginning, and I've been with Think since then and now have ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, ThinkStation, ThinkServers and peripherals around them."
Observing that the Think brand has a good reputation for reliability, but perhaps lacks some excitement, we asked O'Sullivan how she wants the Think brand to be viewed. "We've always been exceptionally engineered; really focusing on innovations to make it the best quality, most robust product," she said.
"What we've done most recently is to try to get the emotional content into it and make it the ultimate business tool. I want people to love it and totally depend on it. A customer said to me this morning: ‘It just works'.
"There are customers that want more fashion and the latest design and that's what our Idea products - that we're just starting to roll out - are all about. Lenovo is very strong in both the commercial and consumer in China - we have over 5,000 retail stores there and are by far the market leader. So another advantage we have is that we can test out things in China and then bring them out to the rest of the world."
