Amazing what you can do with figures, and the Financial Times’ shock horror PCs overtake mainframe revenues at IBM revelation yesterday may have caused something of a stir and maybe a frisson or two – but everyone can go back to sleep: while the Entry Systems division may indeed reach $15,000m sales this year and top the $15,200m IBM did in mainframes last year – against $11,300m in 1988, that mainframes figure covers only processors: there’s another $6,000m or so to add in for disk drives, there’s some $2,000m for mainframe software, something close to that for mainframe hardware and software support, plus the 3480 and 3490 tape drives and the 3720 and 3745 communications processors, and big printers, which means that mainframes still account for around half of IBM’s $60,000m business.
