IBM Corp has abandoned one of its three Power Personal systems, the sleek, small-footprint executive model known as Polo which has been widely shown since it featured on the cover of Byte magazine last April. It seems the ‘executive’ price was never going to make a good business model so the unit was dropped a couple of weeks back. IBM’s Power Personals started life as PowerPC 601 machines, metamorphosed into 603 affairs, and have been seen at every trade show for nearly a year, been written up, reviewed and now made obsolete without ever coming to market. That leaves only the desktop and the Thinkpad-style notebook for the spring announcement. Under Louis Gerstner’s new regime, Michael Coleman has been brought from the Personal Computer Co under RS/6000 chief Bill Filip to breathe some life into that part of the organisation. Early indications are that in his new role as personal computer server supremo, Coleman will focus on getting a PowerPC server into a personal computer-style box for running OS/2, Windows NT and Solaris. The existing RS/6000 servers will meet the AIX Unix requirement.
