dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (09/28/83)
The October 3 issue of Business Week containts a cover story on how IBM has come to dominate the micro market, especially in business. Some of the figures seem to differ from what I have seen before. They claim IBM will produce < a half million PCs in '83, slightly fewer than Apple. But they also say IBM will manufacture as many as 2 million next year, which is the about the number of micros of ALL brands sold in 1983 (!!). If IBM's supply ever catches up with demand, they may well cut prices again (rumor has it a 50% cut would not hurt them), and further dominate the market. IBM makes a PC every 45 seconds. Victor (trading at $22/share a few months ago, $4.75 now), Fortune, Vector Graphics, etc. in serious trouble. Kaypro went public in August for $10/share instead of the expected $18, and they're in good shape! Apple shares have dropped from $62 in June to a fraction of that now (look it up in the financial pages - it drops almost daily). They are looking to put mice and Lisa-like software on everything, EVEN THEN APPLE //e! MicroPro (WordStar) says it won't even consider writing anything that doesn't run on the PC (other machines, too, presumably, but the PC for sure). Softsel (one of the top 50 software distributors, counting micro and mainframe sources) says 85% of the software offered to it was Apple last year and only 3% IBMPC. Today it's 36% PC and 35% Apple. The trend is clear. The only threat to IBM, and it's a weak one at the moment, is cheap PC clones from Japan. Since Boca is already run largely by robots, though, it's hard to see how Japan could win a price war. Might be nice for the consumer, however. Aside from the Peanut and a portable, Business Week predicts a multi-user system in the $10-20K range from IBM in the future. Also on the way: a local area net Apple admits is likely to become a standard, no matter how good or bad it is. Also profiled is HP's entry with the limited IBM similarities and the touch-sensitive screen. Opinion seems very divided on whether it will fly. DEC is conspicuous by its absence from everything but the charts. That alone is enough to hurt it in the corporate market place. LOTS of people read Business Week.
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (09/28/83)
A quick pair of corrections to the article I just posted on Business Week's cover story about the PC market: First, I meant "contains", not "containts", but maybe... Second, my remark about IBM's being able to cut its prices 50% without hurting does NOT come from the Business Week article, but from other things I've read. I should have made that clear.
john@ecsvax.UUCP (09/29/83)
As Rosen of Rosen Research has been saying recently, the market, i.e., what people buy, is now driven less by the available technology than it had been until nine months ago. The question most people ask is not can the technical problem be solved?, but does *IBM* have a solution to the problem? IBM's product strategy for the Personal Computer does allow for innovation, however, since IBM learned from Apple that to succeed micrcocomputers should have an open design and that the manufacturer should provide a lot of technical information about its product. IBM surveys the third-party hardware and then tries to capture some part of the market. For the average user of microcomputers this situation in general is satisfactory, but is it really satisfactory for the sophisticated user, who would like access to state of the art technology? john hogan north carolina educational computing service box 12035, research triangle park, nc 27709 (919) 549 0671 decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!john