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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.
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?
"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).
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.
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...
-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.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!