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NYT: IBM PC Division Sold To Advance China's Goals
theodp writes "Back in 2005, Wharton's Michael Useem speculated that IBM's sale of its PC Division to Lenovo was more about ingratiating Big Blue with the Chinese government than getting top dollar for the assets. 'Government relationships are key in China,' Useem explained. Now, a NY Times article on outgoing IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano seems to confirm that Useem's analysis was spot-on. From the NYT article: 'In 2004, I.B.M. sold its PC business to Lenovo of China. Mr. Palmisano says he deflected overtures from Dell and private equity firms, preferring the sale to a company in China for strategic reasons: the Chinese government wants its corporations to expand globally, and by aiding that national goal, I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business.'"
For once, a CEO thought beyond the next quarterly report. Be careful what you complain about.
So. You suggest to complain about neither China, nor CEOs, nor about IBM. You're taking the fun away from my daily engineer's life !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There's a book by Roger L. Martin called Fixing The Game which argues that the problem with large businesses today is that they are focused on the expectation market--maximizing shareholder value--as opposed to the real market--making good products and increasing customer satisfaction. For example, Enron was so focused on shareholder value that they manipulated revenues to increase stock price, while Apple was so focused on products that Steve Jobs was infamously dismissive the importance of his company's shareholders and joked that the one thing that kept him up at night was shareholder meetings.
They're implying that IBM took less money for it's asset to curry favor with the chinese. That would only make sense if IBM got more money then the difference between the two payments over time as a result of that good will.
Has that happened? I don't know... I think American business might have been too brash in it's oriental investments. Most of them seem to be backfiring in alarming ways. We seem to have taught our chinese business contacts just well enough to start competing with us directly where before our technological edge made that impossible.
In any case, it seems like many of the US multinationals have woken up to the issue. We'll see what happens.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Palmisano was not well liked within IBM. He was after all the guy who told IBM's US employees they could take a job in the third-world at third-world wages or stay in the US and get sacked. For this Palmisano will be forever despised.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/ibms-palmisano-techs-slumdog-millionaire-257
Sure, the business press has wet dreams about Palmisano and Gerstner who picked him as his successor:
http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/03/forbes-india-person-of-the-year-sam-palisan-ibm.html
But the truth was really quite ugly. You won't read this in Forbes, but you will read it in - of all places - the reader feedback at Amazon:
It is strangely ironic that, after doing his best to suppress all negative communication within IBM, it should be the reader feedback on amazon.com that alerts Gerstner to what the world at large really thinks of him.
In the last five years, Gerstner has reaped a profit of [$$$] million in the sale of awarded stock options. These stock options were awarded while he held the joint positions of IBM CEO and chairman. During that period, IBM spent [$$$] billion buying back its own stock to drive the price up so that executives could cash out at handsome profits. This is money that could have been spent on developing new products, attracting new talent and honoring promises made to employees and retirees.
Where did all that money come from?
Not from profit growth, which remained flat at about 2 percent per year when you strip out the retirees' pension fund surplus "vapor profits."
It came from selling off large chunks of the company and its assets, laying off tens of thousands of employees and slashing pension and health care benefits for employees and retirees. In 2002 alone, IBM has quietly cut 15,000 jobs. Health benefits, which were promised "free for life," now cost retirees a substantial amount of their pensions. Only one minuscule cost-of-living increase has been awarded pension recipients in the past 11 years.
The greed doesn't stop there. Now, Lou had not only been retained as chairman of the board, he has been awarded a 10-year consulting contract, with fully paid expenses at his previous salary of $2 million a year. These expenses have been conservatively estimated to be $100,000 annually.
Save IBM? More like turning it into just another money grubbing corporation while lining his pockets. I would love to see a rebuttal book. God help us all if Lou's management methods become benchmarks for future corporate leaders.
http://www.amazon.com/Elephants-Dance-Inside-Historic-Turnaround/product-reviews/0060523794/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/185-5256096-7601530?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
For once, a CEO thought beyond the next quarterly report. Be careful what you complain about.
Hey, he's only following the example set by the US government.
The only difference is that the US government is selling the entire nation to the Chinese in the form of borrowing/debt to finance out of control spending on programs designed to produce citizens dependent on government for survival in order to help insure election/reelection with promises of more "free stuff", while simultaneously increasing their power over the populace in general through increasing control of ever more aspects of everyday life with ever-more intrusive and choice-limiting laws & regulations, government control of entire sectors of the economy, and the constant threat of removal of the "free stuff".
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm glad the ThinkPad T line hasn't been changed much except for upgrades. The other product lines on the other hand, have suffered enormously.
In my last laptop upgraded I decided to go with a Dell XPS because the ThinkPad T was overpriced here.
none
I think that, at this point, China is fascist, not communist.
Although US and Chinese companies do business with each other, I'm not really sure that they trust each other. And both sides have good reasons for being so. US companies want access to a growth market, but are wary of their investments in a country whose government and legal system don't function like they are used to elsewhere. China is fearful that foreign companies want to get in to exploit their market and resources, while cutting not fostering local business growth.
But at the moment, business and government go hand-in-hand in China: you can't deal with one, without automatically dealing with the other. So yes, if IBM wanted to dump their PC business anyway, because it is now a commodity business, why not use it as a pawn it a greater game with China?
However, IBM still makes high end Intel blade servers. What will happen when Lenovo starts to wander up into that end of the market?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Maybe that's because there are only a small handful of companies that make laptops. Dell, Apple, IBM/Lenovo, HP, etc all buy laptops from a few ODMs, then put their sticker on it. From a long time, Asus was the only company that designed, manufactured, and sold their own laptops, but they recently spun-off their ODM business. Chances are, half of those laptops that you were using before were simply rebadged Asus laptops. They sold many laptops to Apple, Dell, and IBM. Nowadays, it looks like they just slap on a sticker, like everyone else -- too bad. I liked being able to skip the middle man.
Whoa whoa whoa, first off, IBM did this years before Obama spent all the money on companies which the people needed to exist or they would totally rely on the government for money and help. This of course after his predecessor cut taxes on the rich, made banks give loans to people who couldn't pay them off, oh and that little "war" we had over in the Middle East, which we are still in even if we aren't in Iraq some what, 10 years later? China only owns us on paper, and what are they gunna do about it
I have to ask, are you a hipster Strat? You have that I like it, but only if I'm the only one that likes it
I think IBM did this so they would get kickbacks from the corrupt Chinese government. It's in the article and in the blurb: "I.B.M. enhanced its stature in the lucrative Chinese market, where the government still steers business."
Given the way many large US based multinational companies behave, they routinely put their corporate interests at odds with the US government and economy. They ship as many jobs as they can overseas and doge taxes. GE paid no federal income tax last year. GM invested in it's China operations while it was in a bankruptcy funded by the US Treasury.
But since they are still "US" corporations they don't get the kind of scrutiny that would be required if they were not US based. It would be a lot more realistic to recognize that they have no meaningful commitment to the US and they act on their narrowly perceived economic goals. It would be better for the country if their access to the US political establishment was limited, based on how their economic interests driven by non-US governments.
Why is Snark Required?
How about I complain about Corporate America and Corporate Globe whoring themselves to China?
Few if any corporations owe their past successes to China. These prostitutes are selling technology discovered by mostly the Western world, and Russia, and some from the third world to China for a short term profit. Yes, 5 years or 10 years is short term. China is the only frigging entity in the world with a long term goal. Assassin's mace.
Oh, but someone will post here again, telling me that's just a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory my ass - we see it happening before our very eyes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_programme
It is their goal to dominate the United States economically, politically, and militarily. And, IBM sells out to China, just as they sold out to the Nazi's before the United States declared war on them.
HEY, IBM!! You owe your current economic position and success to the west!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Communism has existed. In communes. It can actually work, if you just want to run a village. It just scales really, really poorly.
Is the outrage because the country is China? Every laptop I've bought in the past five years have come from China.
I think the biggest fear we have is that China is now going to create companies that as the article says are global players. We have constantly dismissed China as a cheap labor pool where work would vanish if the wages went up, then as backstabbing reverse-engineers who dare betray the sacred trust of US companies of moving their operations to China for profit, and then to mindless cultural inferiors where American exceptionalism would outshine and blaze away anything the Chinese could do. Now, we're fighting the fear that Chinese could become global players with these thinly-veiled outrage stories.
As they used to say in the 80s movies, "are you afraid of a little competition?"
WTH are you talking about? GM is perhaps the biggest of the China success stories.
"GM sold about 1.83 million vehicles in China last year [versus] 2.07 million cars and trucks in the U.S. But GM, already the leader in China with 13.4% of the market, is still gaining share. GM's market share was 11.3% in 2008."
http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/12/news/companies/gm_us_china_salesrace/index.htm
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Communism depends heavily on the people picking up the slack being within striking distance of the slackers.
paintball
Whoa whoa whoa, first off, IBM did this years before Obama...
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the things I described have only occurred recently, when in fact it's been a trend that has been accelerating for many decades.
...before Obama spent all the money on companies which the people needed to exist or they would totally rely on the government for money and help.
Wait, what? By that logic the people are made dependent on the government either way. Having the government direct the "money and help" through a third party doesn't change anything, except for increasing the levels of corruption in both the government and private sector. Never mind the fact that the government has no business giving/loaning taxpayer money to private business simply to prop them up if they would otherwise not exist. Doing so distorts and eventually destroys the free market and twists capitalism into a corrupt and extremely destructive amalgam of socialism and fascism.
"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy. - Thomas Jefferson"
A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have. - Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. - Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. - Thomas Jefferson
Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government. - James Madison
The Utopian schemes of re-distribution of the wealth...are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. - Samuel Adams
The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. - Benjamin Franklin
In the main it will be found that a power over a man's support (salary) is a power over his will. - Alexander Hamilton
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
If you were aware of world history as it relates to China and western countries, you would know that "the west" owes its advancing to the industrial revolution and beyond directly to Chinese technologies (e.g., Paper, gunpowder, compass, and printing). So that China is going to inevitably dominate the West yet again is simply a return to the historical norm.
And that China is getting access to western technologies to do so is entirely justified based on history.
Fiscal policy is one way to direct growth in the economy. Infrastructure projects, especially, provide the most bang for the buck in terms of value for money. The only problem is that infrastructure tend to require maintenance which means future funding is in essence commited. Social programs are also useful to ensure what is most fairly termed as equality of opportunity, to help alieviate the inherent unfairness of wealth distribution. It is not fair, as a matter of fact, to deny opportunity of advancement due to ones situation at birth. This is why we spend money on things like education so that we have a more inclusive society where advancement is based on merit, and not solely on whether you have the means to pay for advancement.
Monetary policy is another way to direct growth although it tends to result in bubbles when the interest rates are very low levels to spur investments mainly fueled by debt. When money is essentially cheap, banks and investers tend to do stupid things with all this surplus cash flowing around - like making mortgages to people who they know can't afford it (and then selling the mortgages off at a profit to relieve themselves of any risk), or private equity making leveraged buyouts incurring a large debt on the target company which brings on unsustainable interest payments when the money markets dry up.
Back to fiscal policy, the problem with the US is not that it is spending too much (compared to other advanced economies). It is mosty because public spending in the US is notoriously poor value. For example, the US spends ~8% of GDP on just Medicare and Medicaid, covering only a small proportion of the population. In total the US spends nearly 16% of GDP on heathcare. The UK for example, spends only 8% on its healthcare system that covers everybody, at all ages.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Actually I'd say that's true of all "isms" including capitalism as we see what a corrupt mess we have in DC now. The problem with scaling an ism to nation size is it lets power concentrate and where power is concentrated its more easily purchased. I do find it kinda funny though that the right uses the word socialist like kiddie fiddler when we've had socialism for the rich in this country for decades. just look at how the banks can treat Wall Street like Las Vegas and keep their profits win they win (using tricks like double dutch and Irish whip tax dodges) and pass the "losses" onto the American people with a too big to fail bailout. Being able to never lose money must be nice, too bad it doesn't work for the peasants.
As for TFA since every company that can is either sending jobs overseas as fast as they can close the factories, to the tune of 21,000 factories in a single decade or using the "how NOT to hire an American" as a how to video I really don't think it matters whether the Chinese bought it directly or they got it from Dell do you? Nearly 10% of the Chinese farmland is so poisoned by heavy metals the food coming from them is toxic, their rivers are so filled with toxins I'm waiting for one to catch fire, and 9 out of the 10 most cancerous places to live on the planet are in China, that last one on the list an abandoned Soviet chemical factory town. Ain't capitalism grand? Kinda hard to compete with those that will drink cancer straight from the tap and send their kids out to play wearing gas masks while taking $200 a month wages for the top workers isn't it? Welcome to the race to the bottom folks, enjoy your place in the unemployment line.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
China is the natural master of Asia. The US has meddled there for no reason except missionary zeal.
Natural master my big brown stnking ass...
Regards,
Rest of Asia (South, South east, south west (including but not limited to india, japan, korea etc.))
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. - Thomas Jefferson
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. - Abraham Lincoln.
There is a school of thought which holds that not only will advance in computer technology render communism practical, they'll also render it the only option by destroying the labor market that forms the foundation of a market economy - as computers and automation take over more and more jobs, there may come a point where unemployment becomes so high that a positive feedback effect destroys the economy completly. All it needs is advances in robotics enough to get them out of the factory and behind the till at McDonalds.
Ah, this old piece of copypasta. I've seen this one before. It's been circulating on conservative blogs for years, and sometimes even making its way to a news site. There is a small problem though: It's utterly false. Nothing but a piece of self-serving propaganda written to tell a target audience exactly what they want to hear: Communism makes people so lazy they'll starve, while a free market fixes all. The story actually originated in a publication called 'The Free Market' in 1985.
For one thing, it fails the common-sense test. In a colony on the edge of starvation, so you really think people are going to just laze around and not bother raising crops just because someone else might get to share them too? People are not that stupid, and most of them dislike starving to death. Like all really good pieces of propaganda, it is half true. The Plymouth colony was indeed founded on an initial seven-year collective-property system - that was a standard practice at the time, a simple practical way to deal with the extreme supply shortages in a new colony. After all, you can't run a farm if the owner of the plough refuses to let another use it, and you can't hope to build individual houses for every colonist before winter sets in and kills everyone. It was usual to share all non-trivial property long enough to get everyone settled in, houses built, tools made and industry established. Similarily, there was an initial food shortage. The mistake is in attributing the latter to the former. The actual reason was rather less interesting: European farmers, most of them not even very experienced, with unfamiliar crops and weather far worse than anticipated.
Look at the numbers. The great die-off was in the winter of 1620-1621, during which 45 died from a population of 102. That is the event of which your account speaks. Yet the ship only arrived in december 1620 - if, as you claim, the problems were caused by the use of a temporary collective ownership leading to a lack of hard work than the effects should not have been felt until the following harvest, rather then immediatly upon arrival. Unless you wish to suggest that people were standing around in the snow refusing to build housing because they wouldn't fully own it afterwards, which strikes me as unrealistic.
And of later events? Wikipedia has some figures on the growth of the colony:
December 1620, 99
April 1621, 50 (The first winter of which we spoke)
November 1621, 85
July 1623, 180
May 1627, 156
As you can see, once that first winter passed the colony florished - growth was rapid, and no food shortage around. In fact, this was a florishing economy: In november 1921, almost exactly one year after the arrival of the Mayflower, the Fortune arrived with more settlers - and departed with a trade goods exported to pay off the investors who funded the settlement. Doesn't sound like a communist nightmare to me.
The final damning line comes from your own testament: "The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years." Several years. Yet the colony was already passed the intitial winter deaths and running successful exports after only a single year from the arrival of the mayflower - which means that, by the account you use, that great success was achieved *before* the abolition of collective ownership!
So while socialism may not have been the perfect solution for Plymouth, it wasn't an utter disaster either. It worked, for a time, well enough to get them established, growing and exporting.
First of all, I lived in the US, the UK and Canada, each for a significant amount of time, so I have first hand experience with all three medical systems, as well as some experience with the medical systems of other countries as I have worked or stayed in a number of places for shorter periods.
Now back to your question. All important surgery in the UK is prioritized. If you want anedoctal evidence, my sister-in-law who is a university student in the UK fell on her face (which is quite terrible for a girl) not-too-long-ago requiring in 13 stitches in total. Due to the location of injury (very close to her eye), the A&E (ER) doctor in the hospital where she was taken from immediately referred her to a plastic surgeon who is a specialist in these proceedures to minimize the risk to her sight (and her face). She was taken by ambulance to the other hospital and had surgery performed. This process took in total 6 hours. She stayed in hospital for the night and went back several times to the specialist to check up on her progress and to ensure that any scarring is kept to a minimum.
The UK does not have a perfect medical system, but IMHO it is very good, especially considering you don't usually have to pay anything out of pocket (The whole NHS system is paid for out of general taxation). If you are not happy with the care, there are a variety of options available. You can top-up your NHS coverage with private insurance that pays for proceedures which do have a waiting list (like hip replacements) and specialists while still using the NHS for frontline care, or you can go private completely and buy insurance that covers everything, including GP (family doctor) visits. Counter-intuitively, this nationalized system also created a very competitive market for health insurance as private insurance is basically a "luxury". You can buy personal coverage for a family of four for 30 GBP (~45 USD) for basic cover, to roughly 100 GBP (~150 USD) for fully comprehensive cover which is roughly 1/10 the cost compared to the average in the US.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Consider the implications though. Machines replace humans for even more assembly line work, then attendant and cashier work, then store shelf-stacker, and cleaning, and so forth. It works just as it should: Costs come down, and (assuming sufficient competition) these savings are passed on to the customers. All is well, up until a vaguely-defined point. Then you hit a problem: There are a lot of people who are unemployed, and unemployable due to a lack of jobs. Unless you want them to starve or turn to crime to feed themselves, that automatically means a welfare state is the only option. Worse, those people on little to no income won't be able to spend much, which means they can't create much demand for goods and services, which means even fewer jobs to meet that demand... positive feedback. Total collapse of the labor market, and everything else with it. In such a situation, a technologically-enabled communism of some form may be the only option - no matter how bad it may be, it can't be any worse than an economic nothingness. The only other possibility is a basic income model where the government guarantees every individual some level of no-strings-attached money to at least keep them fed and housed - but such a system has never been tested on such a scale, and it's dubious if sufficient taxes could be raised to sustain it.
Forgot to answer your other question. The amount of waiting for GP consultations is honestly down to your medical centre or surgery (doctors office, usually staffed by a few GPs). Two of my previous GP practices (I moved around a bit) had walk-in sessions to see a GP everyday so you are almost certain to see a GP on the same day, which was great, and if you wanted to see your dedicated GP, you just had to check her walk-in schedule. Those that require appointments usually take urgent matters on the same day, and book you in depending on workload and whether you want to see your dedicated GP or not. In my experience, this was usually in 1-2 days. The most I have waited on to see a doctor for a minor ailment was 5 days, which I found acceptable. On the other hand, some surgeries are terrible at schedeling consultations, especially some of the bigger ones, which means it's probably a good idea to change to another surgery who will give you a good service (In the UK, the GPs are usually private practices that are paid by the NHS through a contract framework and you can choose your GP yourself).
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers