IBM Spins Down

beggs writes "IBM and Hitachi have signed an agreement which will take IBM out of the hard drive market in three years. This press release on IBM's web site gives some details of the deal. 18,000 IBM employees and all their hard drive related patents will join about 6,000 Hitachi employees to form a new company that will be a subsidiary of Hitachi. Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing." We did a story when they announced their plans back in April.

Comments

no one ever won by giving up, you know

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM had some of the best drives not too long ago. So, even with their recent problems it seems like they were not giving it their all, since now they are so quick to 'give up.' Perhaps the problems they had earlier were merely indications (symptoms) of a larger problem.

I think that the new spin off will do good however. I am curious though... and this is because I see this with my own eyes and hear through friends (it happens all the time and is increasing). When IBM started to shut down, did they let people go that were good quality workers that now must in essence reapply to the new spin off? Where there a bunch of decision makers that caused the problems (or just made them worse) that never found their job in danger? In other words, did the cancer just get moved into a new body? I sincerely hope not, for the workers and of course for myself as I would like inexpensive quality drives.

R&D

[Cirvam]

So does this mean that IBM will also stop doing R&D for new drives and storage techniques such as the stuff they are doing at Almaden?

Wonder what EMC thinks?

[jptxs]

EMC is in fierce competition with Hitachi in the enterprise market. EMC used to buy it's drives, the base units anyway, from IBM. Wonder how EMC will do having to buy its drives from its biggest competitor?

I'm glad to see the back of them

[skinfitz]

"Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business..."

IBM drives used to be good. They were expensive, but they were good. You knew that if you sprung the extra cash for an IBM drive you were paying for reliability.

Exactly when this changed I don't know, but what I do know is when I hear of people who have had a large capacity drive die suddenly overnight, my first reply is 'is it an IBM?' - literally every case within the last year has been 'yes - how did you know?'

I (and many others) are presently involved with a class action lawsuit against IBM for claiming that their drives are reliable when they are not. I unfortunately bought an IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive when looking for a solid reliable drive however this turned out to be a big mistake. It was the first IBM drive to use a glass platter to reduce costs etc. but unfortunately it simply made the thing extremely unreliable. My own tests have shown that the thing is VERY susceptible to overheating, and the only way I could get it to retain any data was to keep it as cool as I can (at this point using seperate screw on dual fan HDD cooler and extra case ventilation with nothing near the drive).

Bye IBM - you wont be missed (like my 50Gb of data was).

Re:Moving production to Asia?

[constantnormal]

Welcome to Wal-Mart.

While maybe 24,000 jobs won't be missed (unless one of them is putting food on your table and a roof over your head), but this is only a drop in a river of jobs moving offshore.

I suggest you check out yesterday's WSJ Boomtown column for a little enlightenment, like the paragrapgh that reads:

"Career advice for the 21st century: Stay away from any job that can be done online, or you'll be competing with my buddy Odyssey -- and people eager to underbid him, too. I found a good programmer in five minutes. I'm still looking for a good carpenter."

Want to trade in your mouse for a hammer? Unless you can somehow compete with equally competent coders who charge 1/10th what you do, you're going to be in the same (sinking) boat as the rest of us.

Globalization is rather painful.

IBM is really in the R&D/Intellectual Property

[Sagarian]

They give financial bonuses to anyone in the company who files a patent... they run a great public, free patent search database... and they defend and license them with vigor. I am curious whether they will still do hard disk drive R&D, or just mass storage R&D. Given all that IBM has cooking in its labs, it could be that they want out of hard drives because "the end is nigh" for that mode of storage. I'd look at storage innovations and patents filed by IBM in the last 5 years or so to see whether this is actually the case...

Dammit!

[GungaDan]

"All that will happen is 24,000 or so people will be freed up to do something else in our economy."

-5 ignorant.

"with the speed that our economy is changing, we won't even notice the flux of 24,000 jobs"

24000 people would beg to differ, I'm sure

"We're more well known for our R&D efforts contributing to the latest in technology."

"We're" best known for our tremendous wealth gap, and our lovable platitude-spouting morons who insist that 24000 people losing their jobs is a good thing, and that those who lose their jobs will "get over it" and "move on" to something better.

Your ignorant, ignominious, Limbaugh-looney bleatings betray the fact that your concept of "human capital" lacks any trace of humanity. Nice flamebait, though.

Sold like Slaves

[StringBlade]

My father worked in the hard drive division of IBM and is one of the thousands of faithful employees (nearly 25 years) who will be sold like slaves to the new subsidiary company. According to him, IBM has told its hard drive employees they will not be allowed to move out of that division into anywhere else within IBM until at least one year after the completed sale. Their only way out is to quit (hence no benefits).

Thanks Big Blue!

Brought to you by the we-didn't-like-benefits-anyway-department

Re:Moving production to Asia?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Want to trade in your mouse for a hammer? Unless you can somehow compete with equally competent coders who charge 1/10th what you do, you're going to be in the same (sinking) boat as the rest of us.

How about this? I build up savings while I work. If my skills are no longer in demand, I go back to school for a couple of years and learn about a new technology.

As you quote from the WSJ's column:

> "Career advice for the 21st century: Stay away from any job that can be done online, or you'll be competing with my buddy Odyssey -- and people eager to underbid him, too. I found a good programmer in five minutes. I'm still looking for a good carpenter."

I'd respond with "I could pick up a hammer, but I could also pick up on bioinformatics, MEMS design, and early nanotech."

Right now, I'd be just as unemployable in those fields (including carpentry!) as Odyssey. But just as I used my brain to build a good career in computing, I'm capable of using that same brain to learn new skills. Brains are cool that way, you can reprogram them.

So can my competitors in other countries, of course. That's what makes a global economy interesting, and fun, to be a part of. Some times you gets the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

Re:So that means...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Maxtor purchased Quantum, and the amount of designed-in suck in their drives has lessened since then. :) (I'm a Seagate man these days though, after some wonderful experiences with 75GXP's >:( )

and I'm using an ECS board that has been totally issue free.. (note however, that I don't open endedly recommend ECS motherboards in general, I'm still VERY wary of the models I don't have extensive experience with.)

Abit always sucked for manufacturing, they DESIGN fantastic boards, but the reliability has always been somewhat sketchy. bah.