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Lenovo & Customer Perception
music_lover writes "According to this article, Lenovo is losing current ThinkPad series customers to HP, Toshiba and other notebook vendors because of customer perception. Apparently, customers don't feel comfortable purchasing from a Chinese PC manufacturer now that the ThinkPad brand isn't supported by IBM anymore. Could this really be perception? Quote: "Despite the overall poor performance, Lenovo has still not gained the mindshare or the respect that the ThinkPads command. In fact, it has, to some extent, alienated ThinkPad's fans and taken a sales hit. In my immediate vicinity, those who owned ThinkPads have now traded up to an HP or a Toshiba. None of them went back to their ThinkPads. After asking for a clarification, I was told, "Who wants to buy things from a Chinese company?" That said, our corporate parent has continued to buy/use Thinkpads; the ones that I've seen do just fine, and they've added new machines and a parternership with AMD.
Friend of mine just got a new T series laptop and the keys fell off. After 10 Thinkpads he thinks the quality isn't quite as good and that they are cutting corners to make more money.
Anyone else have a similar experience?
For me, its not the fact that they are a Chinese manufacturer, but rather the performance of their computers is just not there.
Its the same as it was when Thinkpad was still an IBM product, they were tight little systems with perhaps a few cool features (butterfly keyboard anyone?), but when it came to the actual performance of the machine, competitors always beat them and at a cheaper price too.
Now if this is still true or not, I'm not sure, but that is my "impression" of the Thinkpad brand still leftover from the old IBM days.
Sure, ThinkPads for years have been manufactured in the same places that other laptops are. But with Lenovo's purchase, the design and decision making would likely move from US engineers and designers and to Lenovo's.
Would that make a difference? I tend to think so. IBM didn't rely on the ThinkPads for most of its revenue. As a result, there was a slow cycle of development where proven things were kept in the laptop and it hadn't changed in many major ways for years. Still black, still the same awesome keyboard, still the trackpoint.
Now with Lenovo, you have a hardware company that is keen on outperforming its rivals and being the biggest PC supplier. I haven't been considering a new laptop purchase, but from what I've seen on Lenovo's website, they are already adding gimmicky things like white marks on the top to indicate where various ports are, making bulky wide screen models, etc. How long til the built-in multi card readers, and blue neon lights all around the case? The risk is that with a reliance on the ThinkPad brand, and a market share to grow, the T line will start undergoing very short developmental cycles with lenovo throwing in any new ideea they think up and seeing how it works out, breaking what makes ThinkPads ThinkPads. At that point, you might as well get an HP.
Time to burn some more karma...
Thinkpads have always sucked. They are ugly, heavy, and generally have less features than similarly priced notebooks from other makers. So why were they so good? I.B.M. You had the reputation of IBM behind each one. It didn't matter that these things looked like they were slapped together from parts scrounged off of cheap umbrellas and suitcase handles, IBM - the business company - was making them, and that made these ugly pieces of crap not only the de-facto business laptop, but also items to be lusted over. You could fulfill all your dirtiest accounting fantasies just by typing on that loud clicky-clack keyboard and rubbing the stiff nipple. That heft in your briefcase? That's not 'cheapest supplier', nope, it's HEAVY DUTY parts.
Anyway, now that IBM isn't behind these things anymore, they lose all that luster. And customers lose all their lust. They look and realize what Apple realized almost a decade ago - PCs don't have to be ugly. So people start looking around and see what they've been missing. Color! Brightness! Good keyboards! STYLE.
It's all Windows underneath the hood, and in all likelihood it's the same hardware as well. There's no reason to be stuck with Thinkpads anymore.
I can understand if everyone else is having the same problems we are. 40% of the laptops we get have issues that mainly come from bad motherboards. With that many systems not working and the fact that it takes so long for the new system or the part to replace it, you start to thinking of looking elsewhere. Lonovo: Get your act straight or you're going to lose almost all your customers!
I disagree.
I made the same argument to my boss after the Lenovo deal (we're a big IBM shop) and here was his (and our board's) rationale:
There is a difference between buying a laptop from a company where the profits of the entire laptop sale itself go to the company vs. the profits of the entire laptop sale go to the Chinese government.
And you know what, it makes sense to me.
Face it, the profit from the components is nowhere NEAR what it is for the total machine. IBM and all the other vendors took the cheap cost of the components and slapped them together, added a logo and marked them up. Now that markup is going straight into the pocket of Lenovo, a wholly owned Chinese company.
I'm all for free market and the power of global trade but in this case, the market forces seem to be speaking and saying "We can't get away from the parts being bought from communist China but we can choose to not buy a Chinese laptop."
Is it xenophobic? Not really. Hypocritical? Yeppers.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Companies bought Thinkpads because they were IBM customers, and their IBM rep sold them some IBM "solution" that covered everything from software & services to client devices. You see this alot in big banks and government agencies. They would sell Thinkpads and PCs at a heavy "discount", and recoup the "discount" in rollout costs or by not discounting some enterprise server or software.
Now that Lenovo is a different entity, your Websphere, Tivoli or mainframe salesman cannot pad his commissions by moving a few hundred Thinkpads at a heavily discounted price. Hence the drop in Thinkpad sales.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I guess the misconception is that the engineers are also overseas and therefore the quality of the goods are going to go down. [sarcasm]You see, the Chinese are only good at following instructions given to them by the Americans.[/sarcasm] But look at the Thinkpad/Lenovo T60: they are still very well-built machines, when compared to even the Powerbooks.
It's terrible to think that a great brand is going to go out of existence because of unwarranted xenophobia. Imagine if we're stuck with Dell!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Lenovo is still making ThinkPads engineered by IBM and the quality hasnt changed a bit. The keyboards are still made by the same suppliers and nothing has changed yet. As someone who works 9 hours a day fixing IBM laptops for a reseller, I can say that things are looking up. The new T/X60 computers look awesome and relatively problem free (havent had any experience with them yet, a good sign) and Z60 is more or less problem free and has many features IBM has starved homeusers of (windows button, firewire etc.). The whole ThinkVantage package, Image UltraBuilder + LANDesk is coming along faster and faster and the whole commitee mentality seems to be more or less gone. My prefence for IBM laptops is reinforced every time I open up lappy's from other manufacturers.
Lenovo is BY FAR the best Chinese brand for computers and laptop here.
The thing is -- companies aren't always brands, as is well known to, say, General Motors. Any organization that can make superb equipment can also make junk, and there's money to be made selling junk.
My late brother was, unlike me, a super-salesman. It wasn't that he was the sort who could sell anything to anyone. In fact that would ran counter to his philosophy of sales, which is that if you want to sell to somebody, have the right thing to sell to them. Consequently, he always had three lines. He had a high end line, for those who always had to have the best quality, even though most of the benenefit of the investment would be reaped by their heirs. He had a midrange line, for the pragmatic customer. And he had a line which was, frankly, crap, for the customer who wanted to squeeze the cash out of his business and leave town in a hurry.
Those three cases cover the vast majority of motivated customers. Where salesmean ran into trouble, in his view, was wasting energy and time by not understanding this simple principle of selling: there is a natural customer base for any level of quality. You can't sell crap to the carriage trade, they know it's crap. Nor can you sell crap to the bottom feeders by pretending it's good stuff -- it just puts them off. But you can easily sell crap to the bottom feeders as crap. It's very crappiness is in sense a kind a feature they will even pay a premium for. A man who feels like he is getting something as a steal is not going to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, unless you go out of your way to make him suspicious.
So -- the fact that Lenovo can make great hardware is neither here nor there. The fact that they have acquired a brand known for it's quality is far more significant.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When my 2.5 year-old IBM T40 recently flaked out, it was repaired on warranty - including a new motherboard, keyboard, and CD ROM drive (I use the laptop all the time and it was basically shot). So long as they carry on IBM's obligations and the quality stays high, I'm seriously tempted to stay with the Thinkpad series. The T60 looks to be a great machine, the only complication is that MacBooks can now boot windows too so those are tempting.
But the contrast between Thinkpad and Dell et al is the price. Chinese made products are made because of the Wal-Mart Effect. If it's made in China it's got to be very low in price. But Thinkpads are still significantly more expensive than a Dell or HP. This isn't to say that the price difference is unjustified or unwarranted. But if you were to have these computers made by a German company (a country with a long standing perception of high quality engineering) then people would be more willing to have the price significantly higher than a product made in a country famous for it's cheap Manufacturing costs and an unknown Engineering quality (possibly historically suspect).
If you look at their ultra-portable models, they are readily $500 more than other companies. I'm sure they are all made on the same street in China, but that kind of a price difference, combined with the relatively short life expectancy of a computer, tends to push me towards the cheaper models.
If computer hardware requirement growth slows down, this will give longevity to my notebooks. This in turn will give me reason to consider a better quality machine that can be expected to last longer, which brings Thinkpads back into view. But they have to survive this change from IBM to Lenovo.
If BMW or Mercedes decided to move all their locations into Korea and China I would expect their markets to take a severe hit for the same reason. And people would expect BMW vehicles to drop in price by at least 30% overnight. The perceptions of the parent companies are significant in getting people to choose.
So you've done a sampling and conducted research on the topic? The issue isn't that they are engineered and manufactured in China (despite your politically correct anti-xenophobic bleating), it's that IBM was the company dictating quality control standards and would back the machine up with support. You can stay with the same design and "reduce manufacturing costs" in many ways. They (Lenovo) are now attempting to compete with lower end consumer laptops, and that gives me pause. With IBM I paid more and I got a reliable machine, not a fashion accessory.
The idiocy never stops around here. Check out Fujitsu and ASUS for decent machines.
Is this shocking to anyone. Yes some of us know that a handful of Chinese companies make the computers of all 99% of all desktop and laptop manifacturers, but many don't.
So they look for brand identity, external appearance. Country of manifacturing on the brand is a part of the brand.
Over here (Bulgaria) there's plenty of companies running shared hosting business. Their tech support are all Bulgarian boys and girls, but they all have US name pseudonyms. One of those companies I've internal info on (shall remain nameless) insisted on being patriotic and splattering everything with the Bulgarian flag and not using pseudonyms.
After an incredibly weak few months, were even purchase by Bulgarians were weak, they joined the "let's pretend the world is US" bandwagon and sales quickly jumped up.
I work for a large company that is a Microsoft shop. Yeah, we have some AS/400's but we brought those in kicking and screaming... The company much prefers wintel boxes...
We bought Thinkpads and were are definitely NOT an IBM shop. We bought them because they are rugged, and don't break down. Sure, they are ugly, but in a good way. I don't need neon lights on my laptop and neither does anyone else. Neon just says "punk" to me.
Anyway, I've had a T40 for 3 years and zero problems. All our laptops power supplies are interchangeable, and so are the docking stations.
Unfortunately, the company is no longer buying them. We've switched to HP. Don't know why.
But I can tell you that they'll before they take my T40 away, one of us will be dead... me or the laptop that is...
"Not buying a product for the sole reason that you dont want the profits to go to another country (and make that country richer/more powerful) is xenophobia at work (fear or hatred of foreigners; in this case, fear)."
Fine then, what are we afraid of?
You can expand the definition of xenophobia all you like, and mis-apply it to any number of inappropriate situations.
But this isn't one of them. In this case, it's not a matter of being afraid or hating anyone. It's a matter of spending my money in support of a company that meets my expectations for quality and value.
Lenovo has neither of those.
As others have said, it's not that "lenovo" is a minus, but rather "IBM" is a big plus.
And it's certainly not xenophobia, no matter how much you insist otherwise.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
The experience of getting my Lenevo ThinkPad was actually much lamer, although the computer was designed by the same people, and is obviously way better (1400 x 1050, dual core 1.8Ghz... very nice machine). Maybe nothing replaces your first IBM, but also I was surpirsed at home much they pushed the Lenevo name, instead of just capitalizing on the Think brand. That actually turned me off. The computer itself is awesome, but there is a lot less brand loyalty cache behind it. I think the value of the IBM name itself, especially to brand loyal buyers (like me, I guess) may have been undervalued.
If Lenevo abandons the awesome keyboard of the Think series (which they have already on their cut-rate Lenevo brand laptops), there's no way I'll buy another. I am just glad my T60 still says IBM, because it's going to be a cool artifact at some point in the future.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Aside from the Chinese being a quasi-communist state. What has the Chinese ever done to you? The Chinese had pretty much minded their business for the most part. What has the Chinese ever done to piss the Americans off?
- Why is the Chinese considered to be a "hostile entity"?
- The US trades with plenty of "opressive regimes", so who cares?
Yes it is. They don't have it all, but they have control over it.
http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/lenovo/shares_info.html
Legend Holdings Limited (in turn, government controlled): 42.5%
"Public" (The Communist Party): 33.9%
IBM : 13.4%
TPG, General Atlantic and Newbridge Capital: 10.2%
Get your fact straight.
You're close, but not quite on the mark.
What drives me crazy about Chinese products is that brand-names are a dime a dozen.
IBM would spend significant ammounts to make sure nothing associated with IBM is regarded as poor quality. The brand is worth a lot to them. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Dell, HP, etc.
Enter China. Start a company named "Apex", manufacture cheap DVD players that actually work quite well and get a good reputation in the US. Then cash-in on that reputation by churning out with model after model of junk, priced well in excess of what it's worth. Now that nobody would ever consider buying Apex DVD player again, change your name to "CyberHome" and start churning out more cheap junk. When people catch-on to that one, just change your brand-name again. Or even better, buy a well-known, but failed brand like "Polaroid", and cash-in by selling complete junk products to people loyal to the brand (who probably don't know it was sold to some 2-bit Chinese junk manufacturer).
American (and European) brands tell you what level of quality you can expect, with a few exceptions (ie. Sony).
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