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IBM Puts PC Business Up for Sale

Posted by michael on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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."

12 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense by magefile · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:Makes sense by codeguy007 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah I don't think you can consider Dell Desktops to be superior to anything. Sure some models are alright but their bottom line stuff is complete crap.

      BTW IBM hasn't made their own desktops for years, they just brand them. Like most of HP's products now. (Hmm I wonder if HP makes desktops anymore. They don't make scanners, CD/DVD Burners, Not many printers)

  2. Re:Who would have guessed... by justforaday · · Score: 2, Informative

    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)

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  3. ...and announces the Power Alliance by turgid · · Score: 4, Informative
    Maybe it has something to do with the Power Chip Alliance they announced the other day?

    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?

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  4. My friends' computers ... by SamSeaborn · · Score: 2, Informative
    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

    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

  5. Re:OMGWTFBBQ! by brunogirin · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  6. IBM's motto or slogan or whatever was "Think" by HWheel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Who would have guessed... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Umm, your post is almost exactly 100% wrong. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088, a proprietary CPU manufactured by Intel. 8088 compatible chips were also available from AMD because IBM (I think - it may have been someone else) refused to buy from Intel without a second source. This made the chip no less proprietary. Most of the hardware in the PC was off-the-shelf (it was a rush-to-market job). The only thing made by IBM was the BIOS, which they refused to license. Eventually, clones appeared with reverse-engineered BIOSes, but not with the blessing of IBM.

    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.

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  8. Re:OMGWTFBBQ! by rtcmedic · · Score: 2, Informative

    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....

  9. Re:Corporate Profits by Ev0lution · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. You can blame them for the US's voting mess by DABANSHEE · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:Different experience w/ ThinkPads by Otter · · Score: 2, Informative
    The TiBook is 1.0 thick (nearly a quarter inch thinner) and 10.2 deep (and 0.7 inches is a lot when you're working on the meal tray in the coach section). It weighs 6.9 lbs, although I'd suspect that the gap narrows when you throw in the respective power supplies.

    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...

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