4 ms·
"Nobody predicted what would happen next. The first shipments began in October 1981, and in its first year, the IBM PC generated $1 billion in revenue, far exce
by boilerupnc 5y ago
"Nobody predicted what would happen next. The first shipments began in October 1981, and in its first year, the IBM PC generated $1 billion in revenue, far exceeding company projections. IBM's original manufacturing forecasts called for 1 million machines over three years, with 200,000 the first year. In reality, customers were buying 200,000 PCs per month by the second year." [0]
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-personal-computer-market https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-p...
- klelatti 5y agoI suspect those sales were made in spite of much of the IBM hierarchy. Another example IBM in the UK where I was working had a headcount limit imposed by Armonk. No matter what their revenues they couldn’t take any more people on. Did this limit their ability to sell lower value systems - seems a distinct possibility.
- bitwize 5y agoOne of the rationales behind the PS/2 line (and OS/2) is that IBM senior management was trying to put the genie back in the bottle by designing hardware and software to work as thin clients for IBM mainframes. At the time they still thought they had tremendous leverage over the PC market, and were pretty clueless about what customers actually wanted, which cluelessness was relentlessly exploited by the clone makers.