IBM has sold their PC business to a Chinese firm. There has been much news coverage about this. They sold it for just over $1 billion, which is a paltry sum, considering the global market.
Most of the news coverage has been about whether or not it is a "good deal" for IBM. The conventional wisdom has been saying it makes sense for IBM to get out of a cutthroatl, commodity market with razor-thin margins.
But I see something different in the sale. What I see is a company that, like much of the rest of the IT industry, is intellectually bankrupt. It's almost beyond belief that IBM, with some of the brightest people in the industry on its staff, could not come with anything new, different, or interesting to differentiate IBM pcs from a cheap clone.
PCs are horrible devices. They work poorly, are virus-prone, are hard to fix and hard to maintain, and make simple things bizarrely complex much of the time. IBM could not come with a single thing that would make the PC better? This does not bode well for the American IT industry, for it IBM couldn't do it, with the resources the company has, who else will? Gateway can't. Dell won't--Dell makes it money selling stuff cheaper than everyone else, so it won't spend a nickel on research and development.
Microsoft is still two years away from the mythical Longhorn software upgrade to Windows. Longhorn has been in development for so many years now, it's almost a joke.
The only hardware innovation is coming from Apple. Apple has been delivering a major software upgrade every year for years, and issues minor upgrades almost every other month. Apple's hardware, year after year, wins design awards for it's good looks and functionality. Apple constantly strives to make its equipment simpler to use--the new G5 iMac requires, in one configuration, just one cable--the power cable--to be fully functional. That's right, you take it out of the box, plug it in the wall, and the machine is ready for use. And Apple's hardware is now cheaper, on a feature by feature basis, than Wintel pcs.
Open Source software continues to make significant inroads, despite Microsoft's weak claims about quality and support issues (a bit of the pot calling the kettle black). With companies like IBM throwing in the towel, I see it as the beginning of the end for the Wintel platform. Lack of innovation and overpriced, virus-prone software will continue to drive users to Open Source alternatives, which are more virus resistant, are being upgraded and refined continuously, and are increasingly becoming simpler to install, which has been a major hindrance with a lot of Open Source software in the past.
What does this mean for communities? Invest wisely, be cautious of the conventional wisdom, and look closely at alternative platforms and software that may be less expensive and easier to use.