Quote Originally Posted by cleancloths
Carl - I agree with what you say about products and service, and even agree with what happened to IBM's market share - I just don't agree that the quality of the hard drive was the reason. IBM was a big company and as such was slow moving. Also they were very expensive. These two things left openings for other companies - like Dell, Gateway, CompuAdd and a host of others to exploit. These companies started making machines that significantly undercut IBM's price points. Then you had Compaq which compete at the same or even higher price points but offered better and faster machines. These are the things that killed IBM's PC business.
Well, I remember this vividly: The IBMs were the class. I had a 1985 Dell (called a PC's Limited back then) and it was a piece of pure junk. It was "cheap" -- $800 got you an 8088 processor, 640k RAM, 1 360k floppy and a keyboard. You had to buy the second floppy or hard drive, video card, monitor, cards for parallel and serial ports, modem (1200 baud was standard) and DOS.

But they were junk next to the IBMs. Onlly the Compaq compared then. With massive hard disk failures, and the disk being something like $1200 to replace, IBMs lethargy DID allow the clones breathing room. But where it went from "Nobody was ever fired for recommending IBM" to IBM costs too much and isn't as reliable as Compaq, the slide started. Back in 1986, 86, 87, you bought IBM or Compaq for businesses. The clones were just too unreliable and unpredictable. We had TERRIBLE problems with a series of clone modems (forgot the brand), and with Hayes modems and their software and switched over to Everex.

But it all came back to IBM not taking responsibity for the AT drive. They, of course, made other mistakes. Their PS/2 series were fine computers, but they closed the architecture and everyone else kept theirs open, so nobody wanted a machine that required special, super-expensive cards and, if you made ONE goof, would blow the card (they were delicate). IBM then messed up with its first set of portables.--clamshells. They were large, heavy, slow, expensive and unreliable. Their final mess-up was the operating system known as OS/2.

This was ironic because when OS/2 Warp came out it was a FANTASTIC operating system--more advanced than Windows 2000 and available years ahead of it, ahead of Windows 95, too. More efficient too--things ran MUCH faster under Warp. The version 4 of Warp would blow XP out of the water. But IBM didn't market it correctly, didn't sell it correctly, didn't support it correctly, didn't support hardware correctly, etc. IBM had Microsoft build it, but IBM set out the user reqs and the specs. If there's one thing Big Blue knows it's how to build op systems. It was simply better than Windows and IBM messed up on, and gave up on OS/2.

But still, I remember watching as IBM messed up on the AT, and slowly, slowly, slowly sank their PC business, which they had virtually invented. (I mean what was know for years as the IBM/IBM Clone PCs--now the Windows world).