Welcome back IBM. Seriously.

Post #186,437 by tuberculosis 12/8/04 3:42:25 PM 8/21/07 6:35:04 AM Reply	Welcome back IBM. Seriously. [link\|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/06/ibm_apple_speculation/\|http://www.theregist...pple_speculation/] Instead, an even better and more audacious speculation is that once publicly free of the PC division IBM will either buy, or form a close joint venture with Apple to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip. Selling its PC Division would also pave the way for such an IBM move to be approved by the FTC. To add even more heat to already hot gossip, it turns out that Apple is not among the published list of early companies signing up for IBM's PowerPC consortia - a rather strange gap given Apple's now absolute dependency on that microprocessor range. Well, you may ask, why would they sign up if a romance with IBM was in the air, or maybe even already consummated? And, knowing just how difficult it is to keep secrets these days, is it coincidence that some financial analysts have doubled their estimate of Apple's stock price expectation recently? Just think how many positives for IBM such a marriage would provide. IBM would give the same credibility to the Macintosh computer, and its Microsoft-beating operating systems as it provided for the PC in the first place, thereby opening the flood gates of corporate demand. Then of course there is Darwin, Apple's version of BSD Unix at the heart of its Mac OS X operating system, which would nicely provide IBM with a non Linux semi-open source alternative, and one that is focused on its on benchmark beating P (sorry G) 5 microprocessor. And of course there is all that synergy in the high performance, bargain priced Unix server and disk array products that Apple has taken to market, which must be hard to resist. --- Bye bye aix - hello darwin? That makes sense for sure. "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:35:04 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #186,507 by folkert 12/8/04 10:38:11 PM Reply	Well, one question for you Todd. Have you ever used AIX 3/4/5? I have, it is better than Darwin by a long shot, except for the Eye Candy and other such niceness. AIX has a far better mechanism for managing updates and upgrade than Darwin ever will. AIX5 runs on PPC, Itanic/Itanium (1 & 2) and x86/AMD64. I am not disrespecting Darwin... just saying Darwin as a Desktop OS is just fine. Personally, I am jumping for joy on IBMs turnout of the PC divison. They have been himming and hawing for 10 years, finally pissed in the pot and got off. -- [link\|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net\|greg], [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ *i_wethey* No matter how much Microsoft supporters whine about how Linux and other operating systems have just as many bugs as their operating systems do, the bottom line is that the serious, gut-wrenching problems happen on Windows, not on Linux, not on Mac OS. -- [link\|http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1622086,00.asp\|source] Here is an example: [link\|http://www.greymagic.com/security/advisories/gm001-ie/\|Executing arbitrary commands without Active Scripting or ActiveX when using Windows]
Post #186,508 by daemon 12/8/04 10:41:33 PM Reply	well I get your point but AIX on the desktop isnt going to cut it. Todd may have a very valid point, with ibm partnering with mac it would make inroads on the desktop, just like microchannel did... nevermind regards, daemon that way too many Iraqis conceived of free society as little more than a mosh pit with grenades. ANDISHEH NOURAEE clearwater highschool marching band [link\|http://www.chstornadoband.org/\|http://www.chstornadoband.org/]
Post #186,513 by Another Scott 12/8/04 10:59:35 PM Reply	:-)
Post #186,519 by tuberculosis 12/8/04 11:43:20 PM 8/21/07 6:36:20 AM Reply	AIX Use last I used AIX was around......mmmmm.....1996-7. I don't remember the version number. Must be gettin old. As a (developer's) desktop I found it much less nifty/friendly/useful than both the SunOS (nobody trusted Solaris yet) and HP-UX machines I used the year before (although HP's original cfront based C++ compiler from that era was far and away the worst compiler ever). We seem to have different ideas about what makes a good OS - mine involves ease of application development and user experience. I seem to recall doing Motif programmin on AIX to be painful - tooltip windows would simply freeze and the app would stop responding to events deep in the event dispatching code. Even more criminal is that IBM licensed but never shipped NeXTStep for AIX (although a friend of mine who was inside IBM at the time said he had a desktop with it for awhile). So AIX might have had the same decent UI layer as OS X does today - except IBM fumbled that ball too (FWIW, there was OpenStep for Solaris too for awhile and Sun fumbled the same ball). -- BTW, I found out why my linux desktop is ancient - seems we have a custom modified kernel for some reason (our app server pretty well takes over the box and wants some wacky capabilities) and there is work to get it updated. Whether this was a [link\|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/08/amazon_probs_continue/\|good idea] is debateable - although this article definitely exagerates the actual scope of the issues. "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Dec. 8, 2004, 11:54:17 PM EST Edited by tuberculosis Dec. 9, 2004, 12:04:37 AM EST Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:36:20 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #186,518 by Andrew Grygus 12/8/04 11:43:00 PM Reply	It's Altos all over again. This has become practically a cliché - you've got a company with a big name and established market, but you see it has no future. Sell at top dollar to the Orientals (they think they're so much smarter than dumb Americans they'll have no trouble solving the problems) and watch them ride it down. Comdex, anyone? Altos, the leading name in small business computer systems, sold out to Acer as soon as they saw big trouble in the distance. Got good money for it and watched Acer ride it off into the sunset. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #186,523 by drewk 12/9/04 12:39:36 AM Reply	You'll probably have the most interesting answer to this Official line is that the profit margin was too slim, so investors don't like it. Call me naiive, but two-thirds of "slim profit margin" is "profit margin". If it's still making money, what's the rush to dump? Now if you've got limited production, and you can divert some of it from low-margin to high-margin business I can understand. But to simply unload a division that is still profitable doesn't make sense. I could understand the argument that when you suspect the margin is going to disappear altogether you want to sell while it's still worth something. That seems to be what you're suggesting here. But I don't get that sense from stories in the financial press. Even in strong markets, "investors" don't seem to like slim margins. They'd rather take nothing than 2%. === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #186,530 by Another Scott 12/9/04 1:45:21 AM Reply	It wasn't that long ago that IBM lost $1B plus in the PC biz Of course, I can't find a link to back that up at the moment... [link\|http://www.ibm.com/investor/events/ir1204/presentation/ir1204.pdf\|IBM's Presentation] (.PDF) about the sale: Results in an improved financial profile: - Less top-line volatility - Improved profit margins On page 5 they list several divestitures in the past few years. Selling off the PC division is another piece of that puzzle. In short, margins are tight on PCs in the best of times. If demand dries up, losses can mount quickly. The volatility and risk is can be high and the profits will never be high again. IBM's money is better spent elsewhere. Cheers, Scott.
Post #186,536 by CRConrad 12/9/04 5:59:09 AM Reply	No, I won't. Naive, perhaps, sure, but I would never... ...call you "naiive". HTH! [link\|mailto:MyUserId@MyISP.CountryCode\|Christian R. Conrad] (I live in Finland, and my e-mail in-box is at the Saunalahti company.) Your lies are of Microsoftian Scale and boring to boot. Your 'depression' may be the closest you ever come to recognizing truth: you have no 'inferiority complex', you are inferior - and something inside you recognizes this. - [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=71575\|Ashton Brown]
Post #186,588 by drewk 12/9/04 12:54:54 PM Reply	Or you could call me a poor typist and lzay proofreader === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #186,622 by ben_tilly 12/9/04 4:56:49 PM Reply	But where's the fun in that? I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
Post #186,558 by Arkadiy 12/9/04 10:12:25 AM Reply	Or, they wanted money (capital) elsewhere And if you want to make money on IBM stock, you have to figure out where. -- This guy's ahead of his time! He's using quantum programming methods: in universes where invalid data is passed to this function, it does not return. Thus you are ensured that you will only have valid data after calling it. Optimally you'd destroy the universe on failure, but computers haven't quite advanced to that level yet. -- [link\|http://thedailywtf.com/archive/2004/10/26/2920.aspx\|The] Daily WTF
Post #188,735 by Another Scott 1/1/05 1:14:55 AM Reply	NYTimes: PC division hadn't made a profit in 3.5 years. [link\|http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/technology/31computer.html?oref=login\|Here]: I.B.M.'s personal computing division had a loss of $139 million in the six months ended June 30. It had losses of $258 million in 2003, $171 million in 2002 and $397 million in 2001, I.B.M. said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During that period, the PC division had sales of $34.1 billion. [...] Dell Inc., the world's biggest maker of PC's, has said it is the only large company that is consistently profitable in the computer business. I.B.M. is the third-largest PC maker, behind the Hewlett-Packard Company. Cheers, Scott.
Post #186,733 by cforde 12/11/04 2:41:10 AM Reply	This is going to be interesting [link\|http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041209.html\|Cringely] sees some wheels within wheels here. He makes a few interesting points. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that IBM ramps up PPC processor production and the cell processor is everything it is hyped to be, where does that leave Microsoft in Chinese, Asian markets in general? How tightly tied to x86 is Windows? The industry is [link\|http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13350\|shifting] it will be very interesting to see who falls off... Have fun, Carl Forde
Post #186,736 by Another Scott 12/11/04 9:42:52 AM Reply	I hope Charlie's right, but we'll see. :-( As you say, Bob makes some reasonable points, but I really think he's minimizing IBM's strategy in getting out of most aspects of the PC hardware business. E.g. they didn't sell their disk drive business to Hitachi to get at Intel or Seagate. They did it because the margins weren't there and the products are commodities. Similarly with PCs. Yes, having an equity position in Lenovo will help IBM build buisness with China. We'll see how much it helps though. As far as Microsoft's ties to x86, I think they're huge. But it's through the applications more than the OS. Recall that NT was on the Alpha pretty quickly (at launch?), but it took a long while before they (with DEC's help) had a decent x86 emulator that could run business x86 Win apps. Processors are powerful enough now, and OS designers are smart enough now, that emulation techiques are reasonably well understood. But the important applications are a differnt kettle of fish. Look how long Win x86-64 has taken and recall that they did 64-bit NT for the Alpha years ago. ("But they're just delaying Win x86-64 until Intel catches up with AMD," some say. If so, what's to keep such a thing from happening in the future when the Cell is out? Nothing. Meaning, how ever you spin it, Win-Cell will be late - much later than Linux-Cell.) I think MS's going to be hurt more by Linux than IBM's deal with Lenovo in China. They want their own OS. Something that's in the back of my mind is that Lenovo was formerly Legend. We had a Legend PC at work. It had an 8-bit IDE interface. The manual said a 16-bit card could be added and the on-board interface disabled, but it didn't work out that way (it wouldn't boot). Maybe IBM can make sure things like that don't happen this time around. The [link\|http://www-1.ibm.com/businesscenter/venturedevelopment/us/en/featurearticle/gcl_xmlid/8649/nav_id/emerging\|Cell] processor is still rather nebulous at this point: STI cell processor defined Two years ago, Sony and Toshiba and IBM (STI) announced that they had teamed up to design an architecture for what is termed a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. Code-named Cell, chips based on the architecture will be able to use ultra high-speed broadband connectivity to interoperate with one another as one complete system, similar to the way neural cells interoperate over the brain's network. It would be nice to have more information about it. It sounds like a shrunken version of their [link\|http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd46-6.html\|System on a Chip] MCM - Power-based, multi-chip modules, advanced packaging, etc. They've been working on this stuff for a long time and do it very well. Making it cheap has always been an issue. Contrary to Cringely's comments, IBM rarely has a cost advantage with its own silicon fabs. They're on the leading edge, not back with the foundaries that can turn out parts cheaply. In other words, they have their fabs to get the performance they need, not to have a cost advantage on others. Similarly with Toshiba and Sony, IMO. I'll bet Linus can't wait to get his hands on a system with a cell. :-) I think Charlie's a bit optimistic about the pace of change from MS to Linux. Things are progressing, but the pace is still much slower than I'd like. Where's [link\|http://www.apple.com/itunes/\|iTunes] for Linux? Where's [link\|http://www.mathcad.com/\|MathCad] for Linux? Where's [link\|http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html\|Photoshop], etc., for Linux? Where's [link\|http://www.intellicad.org/default-net6.asp\|IntelliCAD] for Linux? Where's [link\|http://www-306.ibm.com/software/applications/plm/catiav5/\|CATIA] for Linux? Where's a good turn-key PVR for Linux - one that costs less than [link\|http://store.interact-tv.com/store/\|$700]+ (+ required options)? I'd buy a good $500 Linux PVR. I won't buy a $1000 one though. :-( The applications vendors need to take a risk and port their apps to help drive the transition. Hardware vendors need to take a risk and drive the transition too. We'll see how it goes. Cheers, Scott.
Post #186,753 by drewk 12/11/04 4:58:26 PM Reply	ICLRPD^2 (new thread) Created as new thread #186752 titled [link\|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=186752\|ICLRPD^2] === Purveyor of Doc Hope's [link\|http://DocHope.com\|fresh-baked dog biscuits and pet treats]. [link\|http://DocHope.com\|http://DocHope.com]
Post #186,762 by Ashton 12/11/04 8:50:13 PM 12/11/04 8:52:58 PM Reply	Gotta Love It when.. we gets to listen in, hear what constitutes MBA droids talkin dirty in the bored room; $erotica$ for the Green-infatuated. Armani amorality sans asseveration - par for the chorus. The only obvious aspect of this ploy is that it bloody well couldn't ever be as simple as the Obvious BS bandied about. Hell, I'd settle for merely the advertainment of an OSX + IBM new-Moxie ['Partner'ship] jointly eviscerating the LongBeasthorn from its engorged guzzle to its putrefying zatch.. s l o w l y . . . so as to promote maximum bleeding-rate, but Not so slowly as to . . . allow the flow ever to c l o t. Tally Ho tyop er typo Edited by Ashton Dec. 11, 2004, 08:52:58 PM EST Expand All History

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