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IBM Puts PC Business Up for Sale
valdean writes "When I was growing up (in the 80s), there were two kinds of computers that my friends (or, more specifically, our parents) had at home: Apple and the IBM-Compatible. IBM defined the PC at that time, and deserves a large share of credit for taking the PC out of the hobby shop and into the mainstream. Now it looks like IBM is getting out of the PC business altogether. CBS Marketwatch has another report."
They're not good at it anymore - desktop-wise, at least. You can get a superior computer from Dell/Compaq/etc, and it'll be cheaper, even after the 5% employee discount (from personal experience).
This from the 2nd link: "SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- International Business Machines has put its personal computer business up for sale and expects to get $1 billion to $2 billion for its desktops, laptops and notebooks, according to a media report Friday." If they really are going to be selling the Thinkpad division along with the desktops it is going to be the suck. I don't want to have to stock up on Thinkpads for the next ten years the way we stocked up on IBM 'clicky' 101-Key keyboards.
I would've thrown it out there as a possibility, oh, 12 or 13 years ago.
(hint: there's a reason why the AIM alliance was formed)
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
One goal of the alliance is to make Power chips used in high volumes. IBM has shipped more than 1 million PowerPC 970 chips, it said. The more widely used the Power processors are, however, the more directly they compete against the dominant x86 family such as Intel's Pentium and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.
Look out Wintel! Look out Sun?
Stick Men
In the 80s, me and my friends had Commodore 64s, 128s, Amigas, and Atari STs -- there were a couple Apple IIs and one Mac, and one guy had a Tandy IBM-compatible PC.
It wasn't until the 386-era (with Windows 3.0 and/or Geoworks) that we all gradually migrated to PCs -- although some guys held on to their Macs and Amigas like their lives depended on it.
Sam
I totally agree. All the laptops we have in our office are IBM Thinkpads (I am actually writing this on a T41) and they just run. I have used mine on planes, trains, cars, boats, even the London underground and I never had a problem with it. Compare this to my flatmate's Asus laptop that virtually never moved from the living room and had its DVD drive playing up after 2 months and finaly died after 2 years and 3 days (that's 3 days after the warranty expired). The premium price is well worth it. Now if IBM sells all this to someone else, I don't think this "someone else" will be able to maintain the same quality and it would be a real shame.
Throughout the 60's and 70's, IBM was famous for their "Think" motto. Apparently that's missed by a lot of youngsters today, but that's why they're called "ThinkPads," I believe.
In contrast, the PowerPC is based on an open specification jointly developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola (AIM). PowerPC chips are actively developed by both IBM and Motorola, although Apple does provide some input to the design teams, at least at IBM (for example, the Altivec/VMX capability on IBM's PowerPC 970 was added at Apple's request). Anyone can create a PowerPC based system. The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) defined by the AIM group specifies the firmware interface (Open Firmware - used in Sun, Apple and IBM hardware. An open specification, unlike the PC BIOS which had to be reverse engineered for compatibility) as well as the CPU, making it every easy to build PowerPC systems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are right, the BBQ does mean barbeque. I have never seen this acronym either, so it was Google time. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=omg wtfbbq
Go figure....
The article cites that one reason for the sale is the slim profits on the PC business, and gives as evidence the $100M profit IBM will make on the division this year. For comparison, WebSphere MQSeries makes a profit in excess of $400M per year, excluding profits generated by shipping it as part of WebSphere Application Server. You can fit the whole development and support team is a medium-sized conference room. CICS makes even more money from fewer people, although it's not a totally fair comparison - CICS is a very mature product. The PC business may usually make a profit, but it's as a result of far greater expenditure and risk. A bad year could easily turn that $100M profit into a big loss.
...when you try to cache in on the international warranty...
You might be a geek if you unconsciously use technical homonyms for common words like "cash."
IBM & other business machines firms of the 19th century owed the US census for their existence, but that market wasn't big enough for them, so they lobby state legislators & county managers to introduce voting machines, leading up to the mess we have today of even single states having a dozen different types of machines.
But for them the US would still have the most simplest user friendly & quickest system of the lot - hand counted 'tick the box' plain paper ballots, like most of the rest of the western world. Although in many other places its the 'number the boxes in order of preferance' preferential varient, like here in Oz. But even having to number all the boxes in the huge upper house (Senate) ballot it still only takes me 20 minutes to vote, & that includes driving to the local school, parking, queueing up, voting, buying a BBQ sausage & onion sanga from the parents raising money from the school on the way out, & driving home. Bugger spending 30 minutes to 6 hours in a queue & then having to buggerise arround with bloody levers & punchcards, like they do in the US. No wonder most Americans can't be bothered voting. Compare that with Oz where some 90% of those legible are registed & over 98% vote (contrary to popular belief it's not compulsary for adults to register to vote in Oz & it's not comulsary for those that are registed to actually vote either. It's just compulsary for those that are registed to turnup to vote, IE get their names crossed off. Once one has one's name crossed off one need not vote if one doesn't want to). Yet even with attendence figures more than double the US, it's still only take some 20 minutes for some 90% of Australians to vote, including travelling & parking time.
Plastic/Case quality. One client has a mix of Dell's and Thinkpads. 40% of the Dell's have cracks in the cases in under 3 years. AFAIK, *none* of the Thinkpads have any cracks anywhere on the case.
Keyboards. The Dell's have a very shallow keypress. That means you're beating pretty hard on the keyboard, and it hurts your fingers. The finger throw just isn't right, either. The Thinkpads have the best keyboard I've ever used on a notebook. It's 85-90% as good as a desktop. And the Insert/Home/PgUp... keys are where they belong, too...
Support. When something breaks on a Thinkpad, I call IBM, I tell them what's broken, and they send someone out to replace it, no questions asked. With Dell, it's like pulling teeth to get them to help. Example: I had a notebook that would not boot up because it could not find the hard drive and it would freeze in the BIOS. You'd have to power it off and on, and hope it found it. However, once it *did* find it, it was good until you turned it off again. I spent 3 hours trying to get them to send me a replacement part. They kept asking me to run diagnostics. I told them that the diagnostics passed, but that was because the problem happened long before the computer would boot. Once it did boot far enough for the diagnostics, the computer was fine! I finally had to yell and scream to the manager's manager's manager (3 levels up!) for them to send the part. They sent the *part* (a motherboard) the next day, but the tech took 3 days to get there (!) to replace it.
These are just a few points that I've found. I'm not saying IBM or Thinkpads are perfect, but they are a *solid* product...
You're missing an important detail, though. The TiBook has a 17 inch display, compared to a 13.4 in the T40!
Regarding speed: maybe if you threw Linux on both, the T40 would be faster. I can tell you that when I hit command-N on a years-old Mac running OS X 10.2, a new Finder window opens instantly. On the T40 with XP, the analogous action just took 6 seconds to put up a My Computer window.
The T40 has a soft rubberized cover that may be nice to write on but which creates annoying friction when I put it in a bag with papers or clothes. The keyboard is poor (and the dock keyboard is awful), the ports are poorly placed...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...