Big Blue stops making PCs - few notice
Posted by NTUsEr on 09 January 2002 - 21:06 · no comments & 40 views
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Recessions hit IT big bruisers
IBM said yesterday it was to sell its PC manufacturing business in Europe and US to Sanmina although it will still make StinkPads(thinkPads) and still design and sell the desktop machines.
It's just over twenty years since IBM intro'd its PC and set most of the world to using its architecture, turning Dell, Intel and Microsoft into X86 Great Satans while ultimately Big Blue didn't do as well as it hoped to out of the box.
There may well be layoffs because of the move but they won't happen for a while, as Samina said it will keep on a heap of staff.
"This is a device that takes our individual products and ties them all together into a system," he said. "As you start to build a personal collection of digital music, you can share it in your house, take it to your car, take it to the gym with you or burn CDs for an airplane."
From DVD players to online radio stations, digital entertainment distribution is a area of rapid growth for consumer hardware makers and audio and video content providers, as consumers embrace new technology that allows them to carry personalised music collections and share with others.
Toward that end, the Advanced Digital Music center is equipped with a modem, which will allow it eventually to send and receive music over the Internet. At some point in the future, people will be able to buy and download tunes and then "stream," or broadcast, them to others.
"Today, that doesn't mean a lot other than the ability to identify your CDs" via an online catalog service, Wolfe said. "But in the future, it is a way to acquire content from the Internet without needing to have a PC involved."
Competition and lawsuits
Sonicblue has made a plethora of changes since it changed its name from S3 a year ago and switched from making graphics chips to selling digital entertainment products, such as MP3 players and its recently launched ReplayTV digital video recorder (DVR).
Much of that ruckus, however, has been in courtrooms rather than retail showrooms. Sonicblue last week sued rival TiVo, charging that TiVo's technology infringes on Sonicblue's DVR patents. Further, Sonicblue in October was sued by the major television networks, which claim that the DVR allows people to improperly duplicate and distribute copyrighted material, as well as skip advertisements, thereby robbing the networks of revenue. The networks seek to halt the sale of the DVR.
Sonicblue insists that this time around, it expects to avoid that kind of controversy. Although the Advanced Digital Audio Center is technically capable of being a distribution hub for digital music, it is limited for now to sharing tunes within the home.
"It is not a Napster server," Wolfe said, referring to the popular service that was sued by the music industry for fostering copyright infringement by its millions of users. "We have been very careful with this product to try to respect copyright because we believe that an important part of the value of this product is to purchase music on it.
"We believe we have followed the law, but we still have tried to make available all of the things that customers do."
Despite its legal concerns, Sonicblue's toughest challenge will likely come from its stiff competition, the deep-pocketed consumer electronics giants such as Philips Electronics, Compaq Computer, Sony and Microsoft.