IBM To Leave The Desktop?

Matey-O writes "John C. Dvorak's got an interesting article on IBM's behavior towards desktop PCs of late. In short, aside from the profitable laptop sales, their desktop sales lost the company roughly $1B in a serioulsy UP market. Showing no interest in the 20 year anniversary of the desktop, it looks like IBM wants to get out of the industry it effectively started. " Granted, the article is extreme conjecture, but it's still an interesting thought - the Thinkpad group, tho', rocks.

Comments

IBM makes good stuff.

[reaper20]

I really like the Thinkpads and some of their desktop machines. I think IBM PCs will always have that image problem that they are expensive and underperforming, regardless of their true merits.

It's a Dell/Compaq world for PCs at the moment. They're cheap, come with Winprinters, winmodems, built in audio, built in ethernet, and crappy support with crappy drivers. Our company just bought ~100 Dell Optiplexes, and they are horrible, horrible performance, horrible price, and junky hardware.

Say what you want about IBM's products, but their support is awesome.

No matter what happens though, IBM keyboards are the best ever made. :)

IBM is a service comp. that knows when to move on.

[garoush]

IBM's key business focus is on services. When it got into the desktop PC market some 20 years ago, it got in by accident not knowing what the result would be.

In addition, many companies go down the drain simply because they keep beating on a dead horse (their product) hoping that it will come back to life and win the race. IBM doesn't see it like that -- it will let go of failing business and move on.

Ever notice?

[The Cat]

How these columnists just wet themselves in the rush to declare something "dead?"

This is the same columnist who used to anchor the group of "Bob the office guy" columnists at PC Magazine with gems like "if you don't have a 21-inch monitor, then your PC is worthless."

Easy to say when all your hardware is comped there, Sparky. How about a column or two about something OTHER than how great it would be if we could just hook all these neat colorful high-tech little icons together and make a new enterprise application? Can't point and click your way through orbital mechanics, can you? Oops, there's another blue screen. Better upgrade Norton and Dr. Watson!

I always got the feeling that the constant pounding of the upgrade drum over there was really just so they could get a new "sleek" desktops of icons to click. This column is no different.

I'm sure IBM will close everything down now and go back to marketing something that columnists don't understand so they don't have to read "Is X dead yet?" "Time for X to go?" "X in 2002: What to expect" on every magazine cover.

X is dead, therefore you should buy Y. Same article, different nouns. Yawn.

Re:Up Market?...DOWN market, WAAY Down

[darkPHi3er]

"Now, I don't know about you, but to me, $66 million is a fair amount of money..."

while $66 Million is a large amount to me personally, from a corporate point of view, esp the Global 2000, it's lunch money....

and Apple is a small, boutique computer maker, that had gone down from nearly $10 billion in sales to nearly $1 billion in sales....if the iMac hadn't come along when it did??????

(keep the flames to yourself, i support both Apple and wider PC choice by buying them...i'v bought (just for my personal business) 6 in the last 12 months...)

what exactly can Apple do with the $66 million?

is it enough to start a whole bunch of R&D programs into Natural Language or Data Mining?

maybe a few small R&D programs could be started with that money, but what do you do about bonuses for your best workers, rebates to your best channel partners, R&D into improving current generation products, cash payments to Motorola for G5 production, etc, etc.

Blue makes THE VAST MAJORITY OF ITS ****PROFITIBILITY**** on SERVICES...it's estimated by industry insiders that Blue lost ***20 billion dollars*** on OS/2 alone (though they won't admit to more than 10-15 billions lost), and more billions were lost on the MCA-PS/2 desktops

about 3 years ago, there had been a push from Global Services inside Blue to dump ALL the h/w (except big iron) and just concentrate on their highly profitiable services and consulting efforts...

the ThinkPad line was restored to prove that they could do it, (i've owned 3 in a row, 770ED, 770Z and an A22P, they ROCK) they've restored their rep in laptops and now many inside Blue want to move on...as seen by IBM's really strong $$$$$ committment to LINUX and Java....

the Wintel PC, from the standpoint of the much debated ***innovation*** is D-E-A-D...that doesn't mean that many, many billions more won't be sold, but each year the margins will get thinner and thinner as the PC falls into the "home appliances" category...with appropriate accompanying (much, much lower) commodity hardware margins

that's why the Wintel Boyz are pushing the upcoming Tablet PC so hard, to try to maintain their eroding margins on CPU's (i owned the original Tablet PC, the Grid Convertible, even if the thing had worked as designed, it's one of those ideas that look better on paper, it's a niche machine design, and will stay that way, all marketing hype aside)

another view on Apple's 66 million dollars profit...if the story is true (about a one billion dollar loss for ibm on PC desktops last year)....

IBM lost ***FIFTEEN TIMES AS MUCH MONEY**** in one year as Apple made, and for IBM, the loss wasn't even noticeably in either their stock values/market cap or overall analysts' buy recommendations