Wednesday, August 1, 2012

IBM Sells of Retail Equipment Business

If anyone had any doubts the direction IBM would head under Virginia Rometty's leader ship the article on the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch web site pretty much states the case.  IBM has been quietly selling off its hardware manufacturing divisions with Printers, Disk, the PC Division, and now its Retail systems hardware!  

How long before they sell of the computer business?  Lest anyone have any doubts, IBM has become a technology consulting company.  Services are now their entire focus for the future.  

Quite frankly as sad as this may make some of us who saw IBM as the ultimate leader in computing equipment for many years, this makes total sense.

Today, IMHO, cloud computing is the future turning Thomas Watson's 1943 quote: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." into a reality!  

Well there may be many more than 5 computers, but with cloud computing you no longer need computers in your place of business and today's millions of servers may shrink to thousands in cloud based provider data centers.  

It is however interesting to theorize why IBM could not longer be profitable in businesses that it dominated for years.  Being an ex-IBM'r, I can't help but wonder if it is IBM's management structure and the incredible overhead they have everywhere you turn (except in actual R&D) that makes them too inefficient to produce anything any more?  

It is time to start carefully evaluating your use of IBM equipment and systems and look at alternative solutions if you have not all ready.