Even the bustling workstation business is turning sour with third quarter shipments from the top six vendors – which account for 80% of the market according to Dataquest, whose Workstation Quarterly Shipments Report it is – down by 7.9% on the figure for the second quarter, and only Hewlett-Packard Co and Silicon Graphics Inc managing to buck the trend, the HP 9000 400 and 700 series and the low-cost Indigo system being the star performers. Sun Microsystems Inc continues to lead the market and IBM Corp, which has moved into third place over Digital Equipment Corp, Silicon Graphics and Intergraph Inc was among the companies seeing a quarter on quarter decline. Despite talk of being on plan, it was noticeable on the trip to the manufacturing plant at Austin last week that IBM is currently making substantially fewer RS/6000s than it would like because of weakness in demand. The top shipping models in the third quarter of 1991 were the Sparcstation; HP 9000 model 425; Sparcstation IPC; Sparcstation IPX; and RS/6000. And, stressing yet again how vital IBM’s delayed bottom-end machine is to the company’s hopes in the market, Dataquest said that machines costing under $15,000 accounted for over half of the market, taking the average selling price under $18,000.
