[Ti] Re: like hell freezing over ?

[Chris Olson]

On Jun 9, 2005, at 10:54 PM, Mike Bigley wrote:

> As proved with Apple's "small" market share, IBM cannot come close to 
> competing with Intel in the Home computing market.

Say what?  The developed markets are basically saturated.  Never 
underestimate the power of a huge corporation with quarterly earnings 
of $22-25 billion - larger than Microsoft, Apple, and Intel combined.  
Consider some things:

IBM has made a chain of seemingly unrelated interesting moves that are 
just now taking on the shape of a grand strategy.  It's not so much 
about world conquering as it is the long awaited moment of revenge.

1) The release of IBM WorkPlace optimized for linux desktops

2.) Investing billions in development of linux for Power, and becoming 
the single largest retailer using linux on the planet, in everything 
from desktops to 100+ cpu datacenter servers.

3.) Investing $50M to sponsor Novell's purchase of SuSE, which also 
sucked up Ximian for support on the desktop

4) Shifting of IBM's entire PC division to third party - cheap 
commodity champion - Lenovo in China.

5) The Power6, scheduled for release this coming November.

6.) Launch of Power.org promoting a partner-based open chip architecture

IBM is setting themselves up to be an Intel-like distributor of the 
Power6.  Through IBM's support of Linux, the Power6 has an advantage 
that no other chip design has ever had.  A universal operating system, 
and a vast application layer that spans desktop, server, devices, and 
even the developer tools - all built for the Power architecture.  Most 
new chip architectures face the challenge of growing an ecosystem of 
hardware and software.  IBM already has it in place.

Apple, Dell, Sun, and maybe even RedHat (think about IBM sponsoring 
Novell's purchase of SuSE to the tune of $50M ) are sadly positioned to 
be collateral damage in this race to Armaggedon - to finally crush x86 
forever to regain the crown that IBM figures should've been theirs from 
the start.  Apple just happened to get kicked out of the way in the 
step by step strategy that IBM is using to execute their master plan.

IBM is going to outsource their desktop market using PowerPC processors 
in the emerging China market (which makes the rest of the world look 
tiny by comparison).  China doesn't trust Intel and Microsoft - they 
want open solutions on both the software and hardware ends, and that's 
what IBM's Power.org is all about - it's an open spec chip 
architecture.

IBM is heading for a showdown with Wintel.  It's for all the marbles.  
The emerging markets are where it's going to happen.  And they're going 
to use China to do it.  The US and European markets are small cheese.  
It's revenge as nobody ever imagined possible.
--
Chris