The IBM PC was originally developed by a "skunk-works"-like group out of Boca Raton. They represented everything that "true blue" IBM wasn't. IBM never imagined the level of success the PC achieved in the early years. Arguably that division was an anomaly to IBM.It does sound like an interesting documentary, but IMO that's a stretch. IBM probably did more to drive themselves out of the business than any one other company with their arrogance and short-sightedness.This certainly wasn't new but on Peacock (I think) they had a documentary on the 3 guys that left Texas Instruments to create Compaq Computers. Compaq essentially drove IBM out of the PC business.
While it's true that IBM made several blunders in growing their PC business [see PS/2 and OS/2 for example] they sold off that division because of intense competition from low-cost mass producers. IBM's business model has never been mass volume sales to consumers (quite the opposite!) They couldn't compete profitably in that space, nor did they want to. So they sold it in order to concentrate on more profitable areas.
The sale to the Chinese mass-producer Lenovo was due more to intense competition from the likes of Dell than it was from Compaq. Indeed the same fate befell Compaq when it was sold to HP.
Statistics: Posted by Bylo Selhi — Fri Apr 18, 2025 7:10 am — Replies 13420 — Views 2728793