Slashdot Mirror
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? "
I doubt most /. readers even knew IBM had a POS division...
As it has done with Lenovo and the other manufacturers, the quality will decline.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This is why they have a buyer.
But their consultants will look more honest when they go out shilling Toshibas POS systems, and they still have their slice of the pie. They wont be baking it, just slicing and serving.
In my opinion there is a lot of money in hardware. Something else is wanting in most of Europe and perhaps North America. The will and enthusiasm to work physically with ones hands. And hardware is at the bottom line a physical thing.
We tend to talk about cheep labor, an expression which degrades labor in general when used so often. And so we end up with a lot of decision makers and wall-streeters who have no regard for physical things in general. Decisions will be made in favor of offices instead factories and money will flow to offices instead of factories.
As we can see in the example of China (owning a large part of the US) there must be money in hardware.
Germany, as an exception to the rule, seems to do quit well producing hardware but in general it is below our dignity to make our hands dirty producing something and this is the reason hardware returns little money in our culture.
Makes perfect sense because IBM has not been a consumer company for quite some time now. They are as much a "good high-margin hardware company" as Apple is a set-top-box manufacturer. Sure, they essentially brought the PC to market, but those Model-M keyboards /.ers love and the Thinkpad division they dropped years ago were already then tiny slices of their business.
There's no innovation left in POS. It's a solved problem. IBM makes their money as an extremely large scale systems innovator. That's what they're good at, and that's what they can market well. At this point, the only innovation happening in POS is wireless/mobility use, and there are countless tiny little startups cornering that market via iOS and Android apps.
Build cash registers is a commodity market and essentially a race to the bottom. IBM is smart for selling off this business segment while it still has value, and focusing on the big systems and big data that is their core business.
Would you rather that IBM operated on the MS model? They could buy everything under the sun and have incredible research, but then do a shitty job trying to manage and integrate across their product lines and business services. Or they could go the Xerox route and not put any of their cool research into anything usable.
No, as both a shareholder and a consumer who has respect for the brand, I'm glad they can focus on what works for them, and sell off divisions that are in stagnating industries that no longer benefit from the innovation focus they've had for the last 100 years. I don't see anyone here complaining that they sold off their typewriter division (thus forming Lexmark).
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.
There is no money in hardware. I found out the hard (stupid) way.
A hardware engineer with a PhD gets paid, entry, 100-110k on average.
A software engineer with MS get paid, entry, 100-100k on average.
A software engineer's work experience accrues without much 'expiration' date - this is more true as you move up higher in abstraction (so I'm not talking about firmware software driver guys, although they should be damn good at C/C++ which helps with getting into other things).
A software engineer can be an entrepreneur: see: Youtube founders out of Ebay, fresh-out-of-college grads. Software initial cost is almost 0.
A hardware engineer cannot be a real entrepreneur. He has to battle a mine patentfield (yeah, same for CS but usually you can get acquired quickly) and huge initial costs. Tools licensing is astronomical. A industrial grade SPICE license + Synthesis + Layout + P&R tools + etc will cost in the hundreds of K, if not hitting a million.
A hardware engineer faces huge elimination by being too close to the transistor level. A switch out of the BJT into MOS probably destroyed many engineers' accrued knowledge in one fell swoop, quickly. Similarly, the impending switch from MOS into double-gates will destroy many IC engineers' accrued knowledge just as quickly.
The same cannot be said for CS, as most of it can be abstracted quickly, and boils down to algorithmic practices which do not get outdated.
Laundry Iphone apps, Stupid dinky games, and apps to help you count how much you fart get millions in funding, while hardware startups flounder to get by (hence preventing others from even thinking of entering the HW game).
Yet, a HW guy (EE Major) has arguably the same skills, foundation, and fundamental knowledge as SW guys (CS majors). Its really just that EE guys don't like doing CS, but they could do it easily. I went to a top-tier uni with EECS as a combined major (and this is common at the top uni's). I can tell you the top EE guys aced their CS classes easily and beat out the top CS guys or were on par.
Why are we paid less? Yeah yeah low margins, blah blah. Well, f* this. I'm taking a stand and telling the ENTIRE next generation of EECS majors to do CS only. There is not much left in EE for the hard workers to do well in, other than work forever for CorpX earning less than CS majors, while doing the same workload with the same skillset. F** this.