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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.
Seriously, when was the last time you saw an IBM desktop? As a computer professional, having seen and worked in many different offices in the last few years, I can't even remember the last time I saw one. Laptops, yes, plenty. Servers, yes, a few. Desktops, none. They had already lost the battle there, this is just the nail in the coffin.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Ask anyone selling hardware now how the market is and they'll tell you it's damn tough, be it Dell or the corner shop. Profit margin's have steadily declined as competition among manufacturers and quality has increased. Machines after IBM's PS1 and PS2 lines were made mostly by subcontractors and were poorly built. They had this coming, especially with the way the market has gone. It's a good thing they kept the Thinkpads in-house, their still my favorite laptop by far.
I worked for the University of Wisconsin, my deparment mandated that IBMs were the ONLY PC to be purchased, mainly because of the consitency of the parts that they used, and we had a lot of microchannel (MCA) token ring cards. 1997 was the last time I saw an IBM PC in use.
It may also be because the they were priced at a premium, but I've also noticed that no stores distrubute them any more, COMPUSA, Best Buy and even Radio Shack used to carry IBMs. I wonder whose decision it was to remove them from the shelves.
Give me a GSM phone and TiBook any day.
Damn desktops are dinosaurs. It's like the phones everyone used until base stations/wireless took over.
Now, of course, everyone should use GSM (and will, soon), so why the hell would anyone want to have a computer tied down, when you can carry it anywhere?
That said, quit making the damn things TOO SMALL. Sony is out of control. Axe the desktops, make the laptops a decent, feature-full size, and call it good.
GSM and laptop. The end.
For IBM, this is a smart move as commodity electronics is not closely related to their new profit centers - research, services, and high end computing.
For Compaq and HP, continuing to go up against Dell is simply going to result in more layoffs and downsizing.
Optiplexes are great when they're configured right, but for the love of God, don't let user's spec their own.
We had a rouge office admin who went on a spending binge last year, bought a whole bunch of Optiplexes for her department. Came down the same day they arrived to tell us what she had done (how considerate!), and to brag about what a good price she had got on them, several hundred less than the Dimension's we generally quote out for general use.
The damn things had built-in video, sound, and NIC cards, and fucking 5 free PCI and 2 free ISA slots. They had 1 free 5.25 drive bay. They were 800 P3's, ordered with 32 Meg of RAM, with Windows 2000 pre-installed (we standardize on 98). Half of them, for some reason unknown, were also ordered with 32 Meg GeForces added on (despite the built-in video cards). The built-in NICS weren't even 100Mb compatible.
In short, this office manager and Satan got together, and designed the most fucked-up machine possible, with the sole purpose of making our lives as difficult as possible.
It hurts when I pee.
With IBM's recent interest in Linux, I don't think it would make sense for them to back out of the desktop market. They have the ability to overthrow Microsoft.
It is nice that IBM has taken an interest in Linux and the opensource movement, but I think that they are more focused on the server end of the equation. In addition, how many of those of us who run linux proficiently enough to keep it around as an actual OS (not just install it and look at it and then boot back into windows) are going buy and overpriced desktop PC instead of just going to fry's and assemble it from off the shelf components? It's cheaper that way, and more in line with the philosophy that drives opensource (i.e. control and understanding of the tools that you are using.)
It's going to be application developers that drive the move to Linux on the desktop, not the hardware resellers.
josh
It is becoming a lighweight server.
Game consoles, Handhelds, cellulars, laptops, notebooks, mp3 players, etc, are sharing the market with the PCs.
The IBM Aptiva sold well in Europe. The market there is completely different from the USA market.
When I bought one in Sweden for my married niece, her husband checked on warranty service and technical support before I was allowed to consider purchase. Four years later, he now does his own hardware and software upgrades, and still likes the Aptiva, a completely dependable machine.
IBM still sells their computers in stores, but they only sell them in "IBM Stores." There are two near me and they look pretty cheesy. Gateway did the same thing and a few months ago, it flopped.
In Canada, IBM sells their computers through a company called Buck a Day through TV advertisements.