I believe IBM makes its money from Global Services - outsourcing, more than any other division.
Hardware only really makes cash in the mainframe end of the business - why else are they outsourcing and selling off PC and HDD businesses.
Today the firm I work at has in-memory database processes which address 10GB of RAM from one process (on SPARC-64).
This is great, and we would do more, but:
How the heck do you develop 64-bit software for that on your
laptop
?
You need commodity pricing for this stuff because its not just the production servers you're paying for, there's all the development hardware too.
Development these days tends to be focused on creating a personalised high productivity environment for the developer - i.e. on his desktop or laptop PC.
Developer PCs are (next to gaming PC's) the most high spec PCs people buy.
I want a 64bit development PC with 16GB of memory, thanks.
Intel should have quit Itanium when they'd only spent $500 million on R&D:-)
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Prior art: how about the Apple Lisa from 1983.
h tml
Given Wang was into office automation in its hey day, Lisa looks like the kind of thing they'd have been trying to copy on the PC.
See: http://fp3.antelecom.net/gcifu/applemuseum/lisa2.
Amazing how good it looks, even by today's standards...
I believe IBM makes its money from Global Services - outsourcing, more than any other division.
Hardware only really makes cash in the mainframe end of the business - why else are they outsourcing and selling off PC and HDD businesses.
This is great, and we would do more, but:
How the heck do you develop 64-bit software for that on your
- laptop
?You need commodity pricing for this stuff because its not just the production servers you're paying for, there's all the development hardware too.
Development these days tends to be focused on creating a personalised high productivity environment for the developer - i.e. on his desktop or laptop PC.
Developer PCs are (next to gaming PC's) the most high spec PCs people buy.
I want a 64bit development PC with 16GB of memory, thanks.
Intel should have quit Itanium when they'd only spent $500 million on R&D :-)