The latest wheeze dreamed up by IBM Corp’s suddenly liberated Personal Systems division is to speed availability of PS/2s and related products by getting resellers that are capable of it to do some of the final assembly and test, Computer Reseller News hears. The shared manufacturing strategy would involve resellers keeping inventories of IBM chassis, motherboards, memory modules and disk drives and putting them together in configurations that met the current customer demand. The idea of the plan is to limit the problems of returns, product obsolescence and field upgrades. On balance, the plan is seen as being beneficial to dealers, because although they would have to carry substantial inventories of subassemblies, they would not have to order excess copies of a particular model in order to avoid being caught with the thing out of stock. And returns should largely be confined to motherboards rather than whole machines. Still to be decided sharing of responsibility for maintenance under warranty. But in the UK, the Personal Systems divisions campaign to win OEM business has led to an embarrassing story in this week’s Microscope newspaper, which reports that Product Marketing Services Ltd, a company otherwise unidentified, has come out with a clone of the PS/2 Model 90 with an IBM-supplied Micro Channel motherboard, SCSI adaptor and processor complex that sells for less than half IBM’s price. The company itself designed only the case and the front panel. PS product manager in the UK Roy Gentry told Microscope sniffily that there was more to an IBM machine than its components, including factors such as testing and reliability, adding that IBM’s OEM customer is not giving the right message to users: it’s not an IBM product, he said.
