Well it is the silly season, as we note on page two, but it is still hard to credit the complete disarray of IBM Corp’s personal computer strategy. In May, IBM agreed with the Chinese electronics ministry to invest $100m in projects in return for the state promoting the PowerPC RISC (CI No 2,407). In contrast to the US and Europe, but mirroring the situation in Japan, Chinese personal computer manufacturers each have their own BIOS and bus, so that software for one machine won’t run on another, although they all run MS-DOS and Windows. For a company hoping to create a new standard – and the Chinese market, tiny now, is going to be enormous – that disarray represents a golden opportunity to be exploited. So what does IBM Japan Ltd do? According to the Nippon Keizai Shimbun, it is rallying to form a group of about 10 companies from China, Taiwan and Japan, including Acer Inc, Toshiba Corp, Hitachi Ltd and the China Great Wall Industry Group to build iAPX-86-based machines to a single standard running a Chinese language operating system IBM Japan is developing – thus firmly shooting itself in the PowerPC foot. Only some 300,000 personal computers are sold annually in China now, but that figure will soar.
