Let's be more accurate here, switching from open architecture to vendor lock in is a bad strategy.
Absolutely. It has gone so far that there are new (often free) specialized versions of DOS to run the old industrial automation applications on new hardware.
easier.
still
Not exactly true. While they did "open it up" it was a case of too = little too late and obligated others to pay high prices for the chips or spend megabucks on engineering alternatives for a minority technology at the time.
I disagree. There were plenty of large ($100B+) companies that were successfully bottom feeding. IBM just had too much "not invented here" = to learn from them.
Only if you count quickly giving away market share to their competitors as a major success. Compaq and Dell could not believe their luck!
The integrated all you really need in an office market was catered for but they had no idea that people were using them in fairly large numbers for scientific instrument control and automated testing with sophisticated custom I/O cards installed.
It took a long time to die off completely but it was a marketting disaster of monumental proportions and major corporates in Europe looked at it and called Compaq or Dell within the week. ISTR it took me about 3 days after the launch party to reallise all the pitfalls and traps in store if we re-engineered everything for IBM MCA lock-in.
The MCA bus was so successful that it is *very* hard to find any decent soundcards for it at all. I can't recall if they ever managed a workable IEEE488 - I think NI did eventually but by then it was already too late.
Nothing and that was the point. The PS/2 was great if you wanted a fairly trouble free box on a secretary's desk. No more daft addin cards to provide clocks or adequate memory.
profit
OS/2 was allowed to crash and burn because IBM suits insisted on backwards compatibility with the AT 286 CPU and their marketing men did not want such a potent machine robbing sales off their S/3x range.
It was a joint effort with Microsoft and they did a damn good job. The product at least by v2.10 was extremely robust and reliable but arguments with Microsoft over backwards compatibility soured relations.
MS had sufficient resource by this stage to support parallel development of fully 386 Windows3 and the rest as they say is history.
In this case Compaq, Dell and Intel who laughed all the way to the bank!
They had all these great products. A large chunk of the PCs are for the office market and they could have offered "carefree SW-HW packages" for that. They had the PS/2, they had OS/2 which might have been the best OS ever for the PC (as in "does not crash") ... and then they just threw it all away.
[...]
So had IBM. To me this looked more like lack of vision way up in the management chain.
There are literally tons of excellent servers being replaced as data centers are upgraded. Most look brand new, but don't support multi Terabyte hard drives. This model will take up to four 250 GB drives, has two ethernet ports and has a 250W power supply. It is designed for RAID as well. One rack unit high, and weighs 27 pounds.
It is classed as a 'back office server' for small to medium sized businesses. The Server 2000 was deleted, but I got that on Ebay for $26. It will also run other operating systems.
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You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.
I suspect that conflict of vision is the correct case. Older established income streams did understand that the PC was a threat to them, but = failed to understand that their doom was already inevitable.
Interestingly IBM is still here. They must be doing something right.
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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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They do certain things right, always have. We've built custom machines together with them and there was no question in my mind that they'll take good care of us when signing on the dotted line. And before I do that I scrutinize a deal pretty good.
Unfortunately they also did a lot of things wrong and effectively jinxed their own ideas, such as the PC. A lot of money was left on the table.
IMHO krw has a point. When IBM came up with microchannel they where already facing a lot of cheap PC clone builders with which IBM couldn't compete. IBM had to let go of the PC at that time and concentrate on customers where IBM was the default choice. You could see that as a failure but sometimes its better not to try and compete on price.
And lets not forget that IBM's old competitors like DEC (Digital), Sun and Compaq are long gone.
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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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I really disagree with that. 1989 I started out self-employed. So I needed a PC that was of cast-iron reliability. I always buy brand names, good ones, and so did most other entrepreneurs and business people around me. I paid a whopping 10,000 Deutschmarks ($6k or so) for a Tandon 386. This did not include the monitor or anything else.
Nobody can tell me IBM could not compete with that. If they couldn't then it would have been high time to get some production expertise in there, to clean house. I am not saying this lightly because I know what it takes, had to salvage production myself before and it was not easy. One trick is to hire experts from outside the industry.
Then I wonder why Hewlett Packard and others were able to do it. They made good stuff. Not cheap but good.
But HP isn't. Except that very recently they are making decisions where I sometimes wonder why.
Or these guys:
formatting link
I have such a Durabook that appears to be almost indestructible.
Yep. And i will bet that many managers and some executives had their IBM careers abruptly shortened by 1990. IBM was and is a rather large = company and the inertia works in both ways.
Almost. Both DEC and Sun were competitors in many more areas than PCs. Both DEC and Sun tried and lost out in that arena as well. Nor is Compaq gone, it merged with HP, another competitor in the old mini line (think AS400 now). Also remember Mentor, Daisy and similar engineering workstations. Plus there once were Sierra, Sequent, Tandem, Pyramid and many other departmental servers and OLTP systems.
On a sunny day (Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:09:52 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :
I am not so sure about that, Where I worked, that mainframe was used for administration, although I think boss also planned to have some stuff of the programming department on it. With a company of several hundred people the administration and the software they used was all on that IBM mainframe. It had its onw backup supply. I think it was a good decision, back then in 386 days, and PCs were not THAT reliable.
Nowadays companies are moving back the centralized computing. They call it 'cloud' or 'terminal server'.
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Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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Actually they were. In the roughly three years I worked at my first employer until they moved the German R&D to the US we had exactly one hard drive failure. I had almost preached backup strategies but one guy wouldn't listen. His board design was on that hard drive so his weekend were shot for a long, long time ...
When the big dishwasher size HD unit on a mainframe went bad all hell broke loose. It affected production, accounting, sales and R&D all at the same time. Brought a lot of stuff to a grinding halt. Having a second mainframe system just for backup purposes was financially prohibive. Having a few more PCs available wasn't.
We had only PCs and all were networked. Big old coax back then. Then when I started my own little biz I had a littkle poor man's network via RS232. That worked like a champ. Redundancy is king in tha business and with a mainframe you don't really get that.
It sometimes ends up with major egg in the face, like when the cloud goes down. Seen it.
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