With the realisation dawning that permanent revolution is having to become a way of life at IBM Corp, people are increasingly beginning to think the unthinkable, that it might get out of the personal computer manufacturing business except for right at the top end: as long ago as the mid-1980s, John Akers was warning that if the personal computer business became conclusively commodity-like, we’d be unlikely to see IBM in it – and it’s been that way for two or three years now; with IBM effectively endorsing Apple Computer Inc’s substantially higher-margin Macintosh II as an acceptable alternative to the PS/2 as part of the broad-brush collaboration, the argument for IBM having to make its own personal computers becomes less and less compelling, and a Lexmark International Inc spin-off solution to its PS/2 problems starts to look an increasingly attractive option.
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