Business is so bad that IBM Corp has had to be rather more cautious than usual this year in its annual round of US price hikes, and it has sweetened the pill by cutting prices on a few disk drives for mid-range machines. Effective January 1, many hardware and software products will go up by 5%, including 3090 CPUs but excluding ES/9000s; the RS/6000 and AIX, AS/400s, System/88s and PS/2s and PS/1s are also excluded. The price reductions are 6% to 12% for low-end disks, 12% for VSE/ESA Distributed Systems Licence Options – multiple copies of the operating system delivered to one site, and 37% on 9371 VM/ESA (the 9371 is the desktop 370). The announcement does not affect product prices or price changes announced after June 1, 1991 and also excludes maintenance charges; Professional Services charges; customer education courses; local net boards, high end disk drives and controllers; 3745 Models 210 and 410; and point of sale terminals.
