IBM on the hunt for Firefox programmers

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Because it didn't make enough money!

It's no secret that it has been years since IBM made any money in the PC business. The PC business has turned into a commodity business, with little opportunity to differentiate one product from another, and with exceedingly low profit margins. Like any other publicly traded corporation, the IBM Board of Directors and management are accountable to their shareholders, and it becomes an easy decision to sell off part of the business if it's not providing a rate of return significantly below the rest of the busines, thereby dragging down overall results.

While I believe IBM has been able to differentiate IBM-branded desktops and ThinkPads to their enterprise customers and show them "value", consumers and, to a lesser extent, the SMB market haven't recognized the value to the same extent. It has been a long time since IBM actively marketed PCs of any kind to the consumer and, while they are increasingly paying attention to the SMB space, it is clear the IBM customer base is dominated by large corporations.

Further, as IBM Global Services becomes an increasingly larger element of IBM's overall business, the reliance upon hardware and software diminishes. It's also important to note that, while there are benefits to IBM by having its services business lead with IBM HW and SW, they generally operate in a vendor-agnostic fashion in mixed customer environments.

The above factors make it eaasier to amputate the unhealthy parts of the business (e.g. PCs) in order to improve the overall health of the patient (e.g. IBM).

Posted by: IT Makes Sense   Posted on: 04/14/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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