Charles on… anything that comes along

Now that IBM is selling its PC business, everyone (bar a few cats and Ian Betteridge over at Technovia) seems to think that the thing IBM will want to do right away is to.. buy a PC business.

Put like that it obviously doesn’t make any sense. The financials don’t work either: as Ian says, Apple has cash to fight a takeover, and Steve Jobs would want to remain independent. (Note that Jobs has *never* worked to anyone, except briefly when John Sculley was in charge at Apple. Sculley fired him and Jobs bore the grudge for, oh, ever.)

By selling its PC business, IBM frees itself to sell anyone’s PCs, even Apple’s, as part of a profitable service business, and can concentrate on the PowerPC range of chips. The services people won’t get heat from the PC people if they recommend Dells.

Even the wilder suggestions that IBM might want to have OSX don’t make sense. It’s into Linux and its own mainframe operating systems. Not a BSD spinoff.

Ian almost hits a point near the end: suppose, rather than Apple itself being sold to IBM, the company just sold the Mac to Big Blue? This would give Apple two big benefits: it would free the company to concentrate on the two things that have the most potential for growth, digital media and software (a Windows version of Final Cut Pro would sell faster than Apple could duplicate the discs). It would remove a huge chunk of expenses, in the form of hardware development of a platform that, even at the most optimistic estimates, has only limited potential for growth. And it would give Apple the chance to break free of the need to develop and support an operating system, something which is both expensive and increasingly difficult.

Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work either. Does that mean Apple would hang on to OSX? The implication is not. But it is the *hardware* that makes money for Apple. Even if the iPod overtakes the “computer” side in terms of sales and/or profits, the hardware makes money where the software tends to be a cost. I’ve seen estimates by an academic that OSX has cost around a billion dollars to write. I don’t think it’s made that back yet. Although things like the supercomputer orders it’s received show promise.

But if you consider that as being promising, and pointing towards IBM wanting to buy that computing arm, then IBM would have to pay a lot more than $1.5 billion. Why do it, then? And why would Apple leave itself with either an orphaned operating system (even IBM couldn’t make a lone OS work) or reliant on writing for Windows?

Sorry, but even if you subtract Steve Jobs’s pride from the equation - allow yourself some time - you are not going to create an arrangement where this makes sense except as it is. Making Windows PCs is a zero-sum game. Making Apple computers isn’t.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• So who's the Apple user? (19 May 2008; score: 23.75%)
• Apple vs Apple: now read the 1991 agreement (14 September 2004; score: 23.11%)
• Nigella, darling, there's something about your chat show that's... awful (15 July 2005; score: 18.8%)

In this week’s Science and Technology section of The Independent, I’ve written in detail about why comment spammers do it and the market failure involved; Andy Goldberg tunes into the people’s radio - podcasting.

Sanjida O’Connell has an extract from her new book “Sugar”, pointing out that “Our insatiable appetite for sugary products is causing massive environmental damage to some of the world’s most complex and delicate ecosystems”.

And finally Lewis Wolpert tackles the fascinating problem of why (human) breasts are bigger than strictly they need to be.

One other thing. In my piece last week about the “long tail” phenomenon, I should have acknowledged Chris Anderson’s fine piece on this topic in Wired magazine. Apologies, and I do recommend his piece as being (a) more in-depth (b) cool.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Bad Hack blog; and more on Intelligent Design (oxymoron?) (1 March 2006; score: 63.67%)
• Spam catcher updated, which I hope will solve problems with nice people being unable to pass comment (26 September 2005; score: 56.48%)
• The wrong way to defend against comment spam (14 December 2004; score: 56.09%)