A highly controversial study from the International Technology Group in Los Altos, California, reported in the West German weekly Computerwoche, makes the heretical suggestion that IBM has effectively been knocked out of the personal computer market. This will become increasingly clear, it goes on, as future PS/2 systems and OS/2 Extended Edition develop more and more in the direction of mainframe-orientated co-processing. The author of the study concludes that by 1992 the PS/2 family will no longer exist as an independent line. The two low-end machines, the PS/2 Model 25 – still not and perhaps never to be, available in Europe – and the Model 30 will increasingly fulfil their intended role as intelligent mainframe terminals, but in the guise of members of the 315X and 316X families of terminals which presently consist only of dumb ASCII terminals. The research group suggests that the 80286-based Model 50 will become a member of the 319X line of 3270 terminals. The Group sees the remaining models, the 60 to 80 – the Model 70 was still to be announced when the study was conducted – as effectively becoming entry models in IBM’s mid-range product families, so that the current PS/2 flagship, the Model 80, could find itself running operating systems such as VM or SSP from System 36 to lead users into the AS/400 or 9370 mainstreams. According to the Group’s executive director Brian Jeffery, IBM’s style and approach to marketing means that its products are overprotected, where it would be better to attack the market from both sides. Despite rising turnover from PS/2s, IBM will pull out of the stand-alone micro market completely, as its share of the market declines significantly, Jeffery reckons. Grotesque The forecasts proved sufficiently bizarre and controversial that they shook IBM out of its usual no-comment stance, and an IBM spokesman described the thesis of the company effectively being pushed out of the personal computer business, as grotesque. He conceded, nevertheless, that the typical IBM user is an outfit that needs a full-scale data processing system rather than a few stand-alone single-tasking machines. And with the PS/2 family, IBM has promised to meet precisely this requirement – but that did not mean that it would not still sell stand-alone personal computers as well. Doug Cayne, head of the Personal Computing department at Gartner Group, also reacted sceptically to the International Technology predictions. There’s no way you can predict what will happen in the next four years, he declared. IBM has committed itself to the PS/2 line, and this end of the market changes more quickly than any other. The business that IBM derives from the PS/2, and its strategic importance, will grow faster than the competition imagines. Nevertheless, there is some truth in the International Technology observations: IBM regards maintaining its position in the stand-alone personal computer market as important, but it pales into insignificance in comparison with the company’s determination to maintain its occupation of three or four million desktops in large IBM shops that are currently graced by 3270 terminals. IBM has to have the PS/2 in order to protect its massive mainframe terminal base from attack and to win back some of the desktops currently occupied by 3270-compatible terminals. And if it can sell hundreds of thousands of the same machines through dealers as stand-alone personal computers, the unit cost of manufacturing will be that much lower, a few more small hearts and minds will have been won over to the true Blue way of thinking, and IBM and its major customers will both be the beneficiaries.
