IBM Corp sent out a stunning message to the market yesterday by deciding not to comment on an extremely negative Wall Street Journal story suggesting that the company was scaling back its commitment to the Power Personal Systems division. It will come as little surprise to anyone that has been watching the protracted and painful gestation of IBM Corp’s PowerPC-based personal computers that the Journal does not now expect them to come to market before the end of the year: the paper hears that new personal computers supremo Richard Thoman has decreed that they must be held back until the PowerPC version of OS/2 is ready rather than go out earlier with only the desktop version of AIX and the PowerPC version of Windows NT as operating system options. More surprising is that according to the paper, computer industry tyro Thoman, hired away from RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp last December to oversee the IBM Personal Computer Co and the PowerPC effort, has decided to scrap the Power Personal name and simply include the PowerPC models among the Personal Systems family of iAPX-86 machines. The Power Personal Systems division remains in place, but it appears that IBM is seriously considering consolidating marketing with the Personal Computer Co. The lack of comment is disconcerting given that the Journal story will have a devastating effect on the PowerPC effort at IBM, persuading the best of the people at the company working on the new line to dust off and dress up their curricula vitae (or resumes), and causing applications shops that had been thinking of developing products for the Power Personals to think again.
