Fujitsu Spins Off Its PC and Mobile Divisions (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Back in February, Sony unloaded the part of its business that built PCs. Now, a year later, competitor Fujitsu is doing the same. The company announced it would be spinning off its PC and mobile business, effective 1 February 2016. Your first reaction was probably, "Fujitsu had a PC and mobile business?" You're not alone, and this is likely why the split is happening. In their press release, they say, "With the ongoing commoditization of ubiquitous products, mainly of PCs and smart phones, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve differentiation, and competition with emerging global vendors has intensified." More simply: they couldn't make a competitive product. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend; the race to zero in the Windows laptop market is finally killing off some of the participants.

Comments

Hopefully

[Noah Haders]

>Hopefully, this is the start of a trend; the race to zero in the Windows laptop market is finally killing off some of the participants

I agree, pcs are more and more commoditized and it is harder to make a profit, but why is this something to hope for?

Re:Hopefully

[tlhIngan]

Maybe a fan of the Apple/MS Surface/Lumia model? That the OEMs aren't really adding any value and you could just cut the middle man. Because from what I understand that's mainly what they do these days, they take hardware from AMD/nVidia/Intel + various others for screen, touchpad etc., software mainly from Microsoft and outsource the assembly to Foxconn-style assemblers and the support to call centers somewhere. It would probably be pretty bad for Linux users, not sure it'd be all that bad for Windows users. The Surface line seems to be getting pretty good reviews and sell well...

But the OEMs are what make PCs, well, PCs.

They are the ones that created (for better or worse) the immense diversity in PCs.

For an example, look at Apple. Everytime Apple releases a new Mac, people complain - too expensive, or a PC is cheaper, or they don't have X, or they don't sell a $250 laptop, etc. etc. etc.

Well, that's what OEMs are for - Apple simply picks and chooses the markets they want to sell to. Other OEMs find their own markets. And these days, the results are clear computing wise - we've got more diversity in computing now than ever before - I mean, Windows can be had on a PC costing $100 (tablet or "desktop" compute stick). This is unheard of.

Yes, for a time the market got stuck - and we were stuck with shitty $500 laptops with 1366x768 screens and nothing to fulfill the high end market. Except Apple who was making a killing selling $1000+ laptops that no OEM wanted to touch and offering high-res screens and GPUs and all t hat. Then Intel formed the Ultrabook market to entice OEMs to produce MacBook Air competitors. Which dragged OEMs into the premium market as well.

OEMs added value by creating computers that fit their target demographic. Sure sometimes people optimize too well and you hit a local minima (like desktops and laptops being almost all budget and crap), but a push away and now you have OEMs producing higher margin higher end PCs and competing against Apple.

Heck, remember the netbook craze that completely died away because of tablets? It's sorta making a comeback because you can get really cheap computing devices. And heck, my $100 Windows tablet runs the latest Windows and runs software written for a time when it couldn't be imagined that a computer for $100 was possible. Heck, most of the technologies that power the tablet weren't even thought of.

Best business class laptop I've used

[n0creativity]

At my last job, the guy who purchased our user level tech was pretty set on Fujitsu laptops. They were significantly more expensive than the alternatives, but every model I used in my 10 years there was feature rich, excellent in build quality, and incredibly reliable. The ultabooks, while not as thin or lightweight as others, still managed to pack 3 or 4 USB ports, a docking station port, a special port for the included external wired NIC, and a full size keyboard. I was pretty disappointed when they decided to switch to the Surface Pro and it's single freaking USB port. As a Sys Admin and fill in network admin (our primary network guy got his undies in a bunch a quit one day), I can't even begin to describe how obnoxious it is to only have 1 USB on your laptop. Need to run to the network closet and diagnose a switch issue? Better bring your surface docking station, power cord, and a small table to setup on... turns out Serial to USB adapters don't play well with a USB hub that's also running a mouse and USB NIC. I actually ended up setting up a RasPi in each switch closet and just left it unplugged until I needed to use it. Fujitsu made great business grade laptops. I can't speak to their mobile devices, but this is a significant loss. I was actually contemplating going with them for the next round of laptop refreshes at my new gig... guess that's not happening. BOOOO! HISSSS!

Re:Expect lower quality hardware.

[Grishnakh]

If the thieves knew what all is in it, they would steal it just to cannibalize the components.

No, they wouldn't. Thieves don't care about components, and don't want to spend time trying to sell technical items on Ebay. They want something they can hock quickly, which means something that has a high resale value at consumer places, and that means Apples.

This is merely the nature of niche-market stuff versus mass-market shiny consumer crap. There's lots of very expensive industrial equipment, for instance, which easily costs 6 or 7 figures, but isn't in much danger of being stolen because thieves wouldn't know what to do with it. Lots of engineering workplaces have oscilloscopes and other test equipment costing high-5 figures or more; how often does that stuff get stolen? Never; they're in much more danger of their $2k Apple laptops getting stolen.