IBM’s US campaign to woo users away from third party maintenance companies by fierce competition on price has been so successful that TRW Inc, which runs one of the biggest such operations in the US, has lost sof much business that according to Technology News of America, it is down to one engineer in New York, and questions are being raised about how long it will want to stay in the game: if it did decide to put the IBM end, or even its whole third party business, on the block, IBM might find that it has miscalculated this time, because there is a string of well-heeled companies, with Bell Atlantic Corp and several other Baby Bells to the fore, that might well be interested in buying the assets, and have the cash and the staying power to prevent IBM from fulfilling its objective of killing the competition so that it can raise maintenance prices again.
