Happy Birthday PC. Seriously.
Next month the IBM PC will be twenty five years old, this should be a time for businesses to reflect and celebrate how this bland beige box has transformed the way we work probably more than any other device before or after.
The IBM PC was not the first personal computer on the market – we’ll concede that honour to Apple (ignoring all the other minor manufacturers at the time of course) – though it was the first device embraced throughout departments and offices on a massive scale.
At the same time we salute what was probably one of the most misconceived adverts in history – in late August 1981 Apple computer ran a series of full page adverts in the Wall Street Journal with the headline ‘Welcome, IBM. Seriously.’ It is unclear whether Mr Job’s Apple Computer was being seriously naive or rather smug in its wording – we suspect the latter. How ironic that in a short time IBM would marginalise Apple as the leading provider to the market.
The history of the IBM PC is probably less interesting than its impact on the way we go about business today. There are now, today an estimate Billion PC’s being used in the world. With the so-called ‘Halo effect’ surrounding the PC the combined value of PC hardware and software firms on the stock market exceeds $500bn.
When originally launched, the IBM PC was seen as a standard, set by a blue chip with strong business marketplace domination. IBM’s biggest mistake – though it turned out to be a recipe for success in the end – was to use standard readily available components (unusual for IBM) and then release the schematics to anyone who wanted them – again IBM did this as a matter of course, because normally its chips were custom and only available to it – so releasing schematics didn’t matter – except in this case it was easy to copy. Once the ‘genie’ was out of the bag IBM reacted too slowly to suppress copying of its product and it effectively had to concede to the clones.
Of course the main beneficiaries of the clone market where Microsoft and Intel, both were, of course, happy to make additional revenue by selling components and software to others. Of course IBM, once again lost out because it didn’t own the DOS licence outright, nor did it have the foresight or will to bother negotiating any form of ‘exclusive’ rights.
That the PC democratised computing is in no doubt, it made access to software simpler and more affordable to all businesses, small or large. More importantly, the net benefit of the ‘cloning’ of the machines created a de facto standard allowing people to interact and share information easily for the first time.
In recent times the PC has become a commodity, with most of the innovation being on the software and services side, not the hardware. Companies like Google or SalesForce.com have started a growing market for online services, ironically pushing the calculations and ‘machinations’ back onto a central cluster of servers rather than locally on the PC – ironically imitating the services of the mainframes that the PC was to replace.
Of course the byword of the day is convergence – as microelectronics moved relentlessly forward – the combination of mobile phone and web services, video and email on the phone may eventually change the way we work more than the PC.
Ironically it won’t be IBM that celebrate the birthday, it will be the Chinese firm Lenovo – IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo in 2004, it had actually never worked out how to turn a profit on the PC selling business.