Putting what is clearly going to be a rotten first quarter for IBM Corp – in which it is highly likely that it will make another operating loss – into focus, the company told analysts that the only areas where it sees sales improvements this quarter are painfully low margin personal computers – and in the fourth quarter, personal computers may have been up by 50% in volume, but turnover was down and the business was unprofitable – and possibly workstations; the AS/400 market is of course now frozen pending ships of the next generation of machines.
