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IBM Sells Point-Of-Sale Business To Toshiba
ErichTheRed writes "Yet another move by IBM out of end-user hardware, Toshiba will be buying IBM's retail point-of-sale systems business for $850M. Is it really a good idea for a company defined by good (and in this case, high-margin) hardware to sell it off in favor of nebulous consulting stuff? 'Like IBM's spin-offs of its PC, high-end printer, and disk drive manufacturing businesses to Lenovo, Ricoh, and Hitachi respectively in the past decade, IBM is not just selling off the RSS division but creating a holding company where it will have a stake initially but which it will eventually sell.' Is there really no money in hardware anymore? "
As it has done with Lenovo and the other manufacturers, the quality will decline.
Lenovo still has a pretty good rep. Anyway, nothing beats the quality of those old IBM card punches.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Why? I see their hardware in checkout lanes everywhere. I assumed others have noticed too.
Is when Toshiba makes the purchase, will it be credit or debit?
Note that one of IBM's first products in 1911 was a commercial scale. Since supermarket POS systems usually include a scale for weighing produce, this ends a century of IBM selling weighing devices.