CJ, what I said was, they haven't produced "A SINGLE IMPORTANT INNOVATION in PC hardware or software". Something I stand by.
Now, if you want to talk about stuff that happened 30 ago that eventually made it into PCs, sure, there are those things -- but those innovations had nothing to do with the PC and far more to do with their own Big Iron platforms.
Even when something new comes around, like USB, it still looks a lot like something that existed on a mainframe decades ago. In this case, USB looks a lot like a channel processor, but smaller.
Yes, in the same sense that an Automatic transmission is similar to a Standard.
IBM likes high profit margins, so a cheap machine would probably start at $1500. And it wouldn't be nearly as powerful because Intel et al would not have had the profits to push x86 as far as it has come. Now, there might have been a commodity computer industry grow up around one of the RISC processors like ARM or MIPS running a unix knockoff like Linux or openBSD, but that might not have happened either.
Just to cut to the chase, are you trying to say that you believe we would not have a PC on every desk as we do now had IBM chosen to either ignore the segment altogether OR to go with their on RISC or other processor and their own OS? This is what Al has suggested. We are now 28 years down the road. Do you think we would have just skipped the computer revolution that has occurred during this period? |
