Folsk have been talking about Lenovo “buying” the PC division of IBM. Two interesting things about this:
First, IBM PCs have had mostly outsourced parts for years. Hard Drives are the most obvious of this.
Second, IBM IS taking a partial payment of Lenovo STOCK in this “buyout.” where that happens, you in essence have IBM having an interest without needing to have a total investment.
I’ll add a third SET of points: Most of IBM’s revenue ALWAYS has come from server and minicomputers adn business machines (not PCs per se, nor laptops, in terms of profits). PC division stopped making REAL good proportional profits, even such as they WERE, when OS\Warp mostly died on the vine. Remember what IBM really means: Intenational BUSINESS Machines. At one time they made cash registers, and the point of sale computer they now make in fact are NOT PCs, they are terminals for what hs been called minicomputers, or even remote terminals for companies like Walmart, with not much at all heavily computed within each store. With network and telecomm being more and more common in business structures, bigger computers that remotely compute, even shared time on big IBM servers, become relatively more economical. IBM is not so much radically changing market focus, as returning more to what has proven to be its ROOT niche.
What is surprising about an International business Machines company taking PCs out of its mix for the most part, while having a 19% stake in LeNovo and some cash flow in also??? Nothing, to these eyes which saw PS\1’s when brand new in college labs, running PC DOS and Wordstar as my third experience with IBM machines. What is surprising to me is that they even got as heavily into laptops and PCs as they did, in the first place, much less stayed with OS2 and then OS\Warp as long as they did.
