Friday, December 03, 2004

End Of An Era - IBM to sell its PC unit

Wow! IBM's PC production business has finally come to an end.
It comes as a shock, but I guess not too unexpected.

In the past, I have heard some great stories, in my Economics class, about the great success and business model of IBM at the time of early developments of the PC. They have conquered the market by lowering costs of the product faster than competitors could keep up with and driving their competitors to huge losses. Somewhere in between then and now they have lost the ability to do so and are now at the point of selling their PC unit.

Its amazing how some of the big companies do not take full advantage of globalization by manufacturing their products in countries where the costs to do so are significantly cheaper. If they had, maybe IBM would still have a healthy PC market. As it stands, the great company that won the PC world through cheap prices, has lost in part due to inability to keep up with the current prices.

What would you do in IBM's positions? Can you think of any way they could have saved their business today (other than mistakes they made in the 80s)?

4 Comments:

At December 5, 2004 at 4:21 PM, Blogger Ilyia Kaushansky said...

I have just purchased a book In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters and it has numerous chapters about IBM's mistakes. I'll let you know my opinion once I read it.

 
At December 5, 2004 at 7:31 PM, Blogger Alex Pilchin said...

Nice! It looks like an interesting book.

 
At December 8, 2004 at 1:47 PM, Blogger Alex Pilchin said...

Here is an interesting article, from BBC, with more information on the finalized deal, as well as some of the basic history relating to IBM and major mistakes they made.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4077579.stm

 
At December 25, 2004 at 9:57 AM, Blogger Alex Pilchin said...

Here is a interesting article with some speculation on where the PC industry is heading and how the majour players will be.

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,955951,00.html?cnn=yes

 

Post a Comment

<< Home