One way and another, one begins to get the feeling IBM Corp may have got rid of a few too many market planners in its successive waves of redundancy programmes: first the company is sold out of mainframes for the rest of the year, now it is sold out of the new Aptiva personal computers until the end of the year – just three weeks after they were launched. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is attributing the shortage to conservative forecasting: it shows that IBM has yet to solve its chronic problem of miscalculating demand for its personal computers, which contributed to IBM’s drop in US market share to fourth place this year from a near-tie for number one in 1993, the paper observes. It quotes industry executives as saying that IBM had planned to ship up to 125,000 Aptivas by the end of the year, but retailers now are said to have ordered well over 200,000 units – a loss of revenue to IBM of $100m or more, and business – and possibly future customers – lost for good.
