RE: news400 goes negative on IBM?

midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>   7. Re: news400 goes negative on IBM? (Brad Stone)
>
>Would would be some examples of the Golden Geese they're
>talking about?


I'm pretty sure that many of us have heard and/or read about some of the 
underlying stuff in the IBM PC Division sale as well as a few not always 
obviously related elements. It might be worthwhile to mention bits in this 
forum.

The PC Division was sold to Lenovo -- a Chinese company. IBM retained a 
significant stake, a good idea considering the likely future of Lenovo which 
was already a world-class company. This gave IBM a solid entry into the Chinese 
market. Also, Lenovo's executive headquarters are in Purchase, New York, USA. 
Interesting how close that is to IBM's New York headquarters especially for a 
Chinese company.

To me, the really intriguing part is that the PC Division is where IBM had 
what's likely its major contractual link to Intel processors. I've always 
wondered why IBM had no significant Power-based PCs. You can find Power-based 
processors all over, for example in various high-performing games consoles. But 
how long has IBM wanted to build serious PCs or laptops -- or servers other 
than iSeries/xSeries/zSeries -- based on Power? IBM has no problem putting 
Power processors into Microsoft products. Maybe WinXP (Longhorn?) is next. 
Microsoft possibly would love a whole new market category. ("Hey, everybody is 
buying new PCs. Can we sell licenses with them?") I'm as certain as I can get 
that Linux will get some play in servers with Power. IBM knows about all there 
is that's useful there for the foreseeable future.

And IBM knows how to build high-performing processors for that market that 
don't have near the heating problems as competitors.

IBM didn't let the goose go far, it seems to me in this case. And IBM also 
ducked out of the Intel noose at the same time.

And they have a _huge_ market opportunity that would love systems that can 
handle multiple languages, DBCS, all of that good internationalization stuff.

I see very little but opportunity out of it.

Tom Liotta


-- 
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788 x313
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com


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