It is just beginning to dawn on people that the celebrated IBM Corp price umbrella under which all other major computer manufacturers sheltered for all of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s was an indefensible rip-off even more outrageous than the price of compact disks in the UK market, allowing companies to grow inordinately fat and hopelessly inefficient while still complaining about how hard it was to compete with IBM: now all that has been blown apart by the open systems whirlwind, although it has taken an age to catch up with companies operating in protected markets like Siemens AG, which has been shielded from the worst of the hurricane by complaisant German public sector customers that buy most of its mainframes; the enormous costs of absorbing the non-economy of the former German Democratic Republic means that even that protection must soon come to an end, and Siemens says that it will have to cut its workforce substantially further to become competitive, with Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG – which despite all the pain so far still looks like a ghastly accident waiting to happen – and semiconductors singled out as the biggest problem areas.
