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Chinese PC Maker Looks to Buy IBM's PC Business
idril writes "According to The New York Times (free registration required), China's largest PC maker is reportedly in talks to buy IBM's PC business. Lenovo, formerly known as Legend, is the leading PC maker in Asia outside Japan. Lenovo sells primarily low cost PCs; acquiring IBM's business would help them raise their brand recognition and status among more affluent, brand-conscious consumers."
Won't take for the word to get out that they've been eaten by a Chinese megacorp. And if they focus more on 'name recognition' than the quality of their computers, it will take even less time to turn this effort of theirs to prove useless.
If America and American workers were any good at it the business would have stayed put without any problems. Clearly the companies which are outsourcing and selling their business units to other countries do not feel that America and American workers are good value for money.
A side issue is the sale of sensitive technology to Lenovo, which may have connections to the Chinese military.
In my opinion, IBM should sell its operations to a European company or a Japanese company. For the latter, I suggest Toshiba. It currently sells laptops that use a finger mouse just like the one in IBM's current notebooks. For the former, I suggest some Eastern European company. Eastern Europe could use the work. Also, Poland currently has many personal computer manufacturers.
IBM may receive a small-ish price from an Eastern European company, but there are larger issues here. IBM management should ponder its corporate social responsibility (CSR) and help to expand Western culture. Unlike the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans are certainly committed to Western values.
IBM getting out of the PC business is a sad day for all of us. They commoditized the PC and made it possible for all of us to have cheap gaming and porn platforms right in our living rooms and bedrooms. Not to mention they built some pretty good computers. I still love my ThinkPad despite its occasional ACPI-related problems. I don't think "Lenovo" is going to be quite the same...
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I would be sad to see in a few years that a 5 year old ThinkPad would be worth more than a brand new one...
I dimly remember my first ever Thinkpad was made by Ricoh.
These are the kind of jobs and businesses that need to stay in America.
See:
http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/010902/09ib m.html in America.
The fact of the mater is any company can't run a business in the red indefinitly. And the date of this article suggests IBM has been bleading profits into the PC operations for some time.
And the web never forgets...
According to this website, in 1993 IBM created a PC dividion to compete agianst mailorder companies (Gateway, Dell, et al) and called that Dividion "Ambra".
The article states the Ambra division was miss managed and had poor customer service, leading to it's closure just one year later in 1994. The division would later be resurected as the IBM "Aptiva" line of personal computers many more of us know today.
As a college student I was very pleased with the support I received for my Ambra (386 I believe). The monitor went bad and IBM had a new one waiting for me at my dorm within 24 hours of the service call. I was sad to see Ambra go.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Rumour has it that IBM is negotiating with Apple to license OSX for a new line of PPC based ThinkPads. So you may be in luck.
Maybe we'll see Athlon 64 PCs from "IBM" this way. Lenovo is a big AMD customer. They aren't insecurely limiting their AMD64 usage because of a fear they'll outshine Power architecture machines like IBM is. C'mon IBM, listen to your software engineers and sell/promote the good stuff.
IBM's Thinkpad market has issues. The rest of the manufacturers are doing rings around them. AMD64's, 3 GHz Intel's, etc., while IBM still sits on 1.6 GHz/1.8 GHz. The base IBM laptop hardware may be built like a rock and look and feel like it, but when the purchasing public can buy a machine that has a widescreen display, reasonable sound, AMD64, FireWire, for half the cost of the Thinkpad, I know where the money ends up and it is not in IBM's pocket. Whenever you compare apples to apples, the bushel that costs less for the same quality will usually get purchased. Yes, I like the trackpoint better than a touchpad. I would rather use a mouse than a touchpad. I was thinking about buying an IBM laptop for myself but when I can get a laptop with better features and the latest hardware for half the cost, IBM dropped out of the running. Methinks that IBM rested on it name believing that because it says "IBM" on the lid that the crowd will buy their overpriced, antique hardware but they goofed on this one, big time, and they only have themselves to blame.
They very well may not market them using the IBM name and logo, but rather simply market them as IBM's desktop solution. After all, IBM did scrapped its NetVista thin client line and started selling thin clients from Neoware. It's been done before.
I wonder, since the only place left for Intel chips at IBM will likely be in low-end servers, will IBM create a low-end PowerPC chip to compete with Wintel at some point?
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
china doesn't need to buy U.S. companies when it can buy the U.S. government (nakedly, in the form of debt, and more covertly, in the form of poltical contributions).
of course, you could say that (top) U.S. companies and the U.S. government are almost indistinguishable by now, and we'd both be right...
Interestingly, no one here seems to have any real information about the reasoning and details of the potential "sale of IBM's PC business". The truth of the matter is that IBM is only interested in selling the MANUFACTURING END, not the BRAND. There will still be IBM PCs and laptops, but they will not actually be built by IBM.
How do I know this? I asked.
Yes, this is also bad news, but in detail it is quite different from what is being claimed here, as usual.
Though my Thinkpad T40 was assembled in China, I understand that most, if not all, of the Thinkpad design came from your excellent Japanese lab. As far as I can say, your lab is one of the few that understands the balance between durability, usability and portability: Unlike Dell and HP ("bulky, heavy, suitable only for U.S. where people don't walk"), and unlike some Japanese makers ("make everything smaller, no matter how fragile it gets, and you have some unusable tiny keyboard as a bonus!"), your lab always provides some excellent machines that I can actually carry around and comfortably type.
IBM, please don't kill these guys. If possible, please consider branching out a new company specializing in laptops (just as you did for Lexmark). Cheap hardware makers don't need these guys I think, and I don't want to see your lab simply closed (or converted to a software lab). I see Apple is making a great progress in this "durable, portable and usable" segment, but I hope there's some healthy competition even in such a small niche.