“International Business Machines, whose first I.B.M. PC in 1981 moved personal computing out of the hobby shop and into the corporate and consumer mainstream, has put the business up for sale, people close to the negotiations said yesterday. While I.B.M. long ago ceded the lead in the personal computer market to Dell and Hewlett-Packard so it could focus instead on the more lucrative corporate server and computer services business, a sale would nonetheless bring the end of an era in an industry that it helped invent. The sale, likely to be in the $1 billion to $2 billion range, is expected to include the entire range of desktop, laptop and notebook computers made by I.B.M.,” Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steve Lohr report for The New York Times.
“The retreat from the business may be the ultimate acknowledgement that the personal computer has become a staple of everyday life, a commodity product, yielding very slim profits. The companies that make the most money from PC’s these days are Microsoft and Intel – whose software and chips are the standard for most of the personal computers sold, regardless of the maker,” Sorkin and Lohr report. “According to the people close to the negotiations, I.B.M. is in serious discussions with Lenovo, China’s largest maker of personal computers, and at least one other potential buyer for the unit. Lenovo was formerly known as Legend.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagine someone saying in 1984, “in two decades Apple will still be making Macs and IBM won’t even be in the PC business.” Who would have believed it?
Maybe IBM saw that selling Intel PCs was not worth the effort.
So if the sale to Lenovo goes through, will we refer to all PCs as “Lenovo-compatible” from then on? ;^)
Wrong!!! “whose first I.B.M. PC in 1981 moved personal computing out of the hobby shop” That was Apple, the PC was a catch up player as the BigIron men got worried about loosing control of the corporate desktop
Next POWerPC chips???????????
er.. It is what it is, man.. IBM had the brand equity in the 80’s in offices around the globe… Apple had cool machines that were selling like mad…
It was IBM that legitimized the PC as a business tool though.. which only makes it ironic, because they hated the PC industry…
Not exactly a surprise, but how will this affect Apple?
The only thing I care about is if or how this will effect IBM’s chipmaking business, and the production of future chips for Apple desktops and laptops. Anyone want to take a stab at that?
hmmm, well I guess that’s one of the 3 PC companies that are going to fade into non-existence, I wonder what the other 2 re going to be?
At least they’re not going out of business, but I wonder if this will stir things up for that prediction.
By the way if this goes through, that’s already one out of the ten top PC makers gone. Only two to go for Gartner to be right… :p
By the way, MDN hasn’t posted this yet, but Olympus is trying to launch yet *another* iPod killer.. this time same price as the iPod as far as I can tell.. Goes by the awe inspiring name “m:robe”
http://macminute.com/2004/12/03/mrobe/
Maybe IBM will finally be able to concentrate on making chips now that it’s trying to leave the pc business! yes more switchers coming over!! lol not that i know this just pure speculation
“The only thing I care about is if or how this will effect IBM’s chipmaking business, and the production of future chips for Apple desktops and laptops. Anyone want to take a stab at that?”
It doesn’t. The desktop/laptop PC business is using Intel chips, not IBM Power architecture chips. IBM uses their own chips for the high end server and supercomputing products.
critic-thx for putting that perpesctive, I forgot about that! well @ least now they are saving money instead of spending it on intel! Hopefully this means they will invest in providing chips faster for apple! I heard yesterday about some powereverywhere conference, where the “G6” was being tlking about.(this was from appleinsider) they said that will start of @ 6ghz!! can you imagine that!! crazie!!! good times ahead my fellow mac users!
IBM has committed itself to LINUX and has no desire to play in the desktop market, where margins are paper thin. With their desktop line out of the way, they will be free to sell other companies desktops on system contracts. Mac on the Desktop and Linux on the Server sounds great to me.
I wonder who came up with the name “Lenovo”, it sounds like some soviet-era airliner. Hopefully someone will rebrand it with something that sounds less ominous.
Nightmare of a business. Mac Night Owl asks whether it’s a dream or nightmare if software was never updated. When China makes the box, the chips, the peripherals AND the OS AND the applications software, then personal computers will have finally become appliances. Other that or we’ll be storing as much data as municipal libraries (or making full-length Pixar type animated cartoons) on our desktops — with a few (cough) clicks of the mouse. How much power do you need?
Anyway, the low-margin PC business is not something IBM should hold on to; it makes perfect sense to dump it. For Apple to survive, it has to generate value in the software-hardware-brand equation. Other that or get enough market share to dump the box-making business to two or three licensees. Apple then becomes like Microsoft — only without the Gates baggage (heheh).
On another note, I’m beginning to believe the choice of magic words was done by some aunt Mabel somewhere. Or someone censors the list of expleteives or body parts. Bo~ring.
Lenovo — le nouvueau — el nuevo — il nuovo — [the new]. Or it’s the surname of his Russian in-laws.
Apple has 1-2 billion dollars to invest.
Why not buy IBM’s PC business ? With their good design, etc, Apple could make more off it than IBM did.
And they could bundle the machines with Quicktime, iTunes, Appleworks, Filemaker, etc. to get people used to the idea of buying a Mac the next time.
One thing this will do for IBM: they get out of Microsoft’s influence. For their PC line of products they were dependent on MS, and MS had used that leverage in the past to damage IBM when they toed the line, like with OS-2.
Servers and business solutions do not depend on Windows, so IBM is free to do what they like.
1 down, 2 to go if one’s to believe the Gartner predictions
I agree with hagar57. IBM shaking itself free of MS is a big move. With IBM pushing Linux and UNIX the battle lines are forming. Sun seems to be lost to the dark side in its new Tango with MS.
mike wrote: “It was IBM that legitimized the PC as a business tool though..”
mike, you mean “lobotomized”, right?
With IBM free to develop their version of UNIX, the future (far future) battle lines may be fought between IBM and OSX. Longhorn may even be out by then.
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Isn’t Lenovo one of those new fangled drugs we see on TV?
Side effects of taking Lenovo include constipation, headache, stiff joints, decreased vision, and loss of style and girlfriend.
It was IBM vs Apple in the first desktop wars. Apple is the last one standing in that fight.