The made to order model of Dell, Dell Online, made possible by the internet and Dells enormous supply chain efficiency, pushed the price point to $500 for entry-level PCs by the late 90s. In the last 10 years, a number of attempts have been made to bring down the price dramatically. For nearly 15 years, PCs had price points of $1,000 though the consumer got better features and performance year after year, the price remained the same. Originally positioned as a convenient alternative to the terminal (slave to the master IBM mainframes) by Apple computers, PCs over the years have become consumer appliances. The world today is consuming in excess of a hundred million PCs every year. Legendary companies such as Intel, Compaq and Dell on the hardware front and Microsoft, Novell and Borland on the software front created this PC industry. Thanks to the open architecture of IBM PCs, a whole range of component manufacturersprocessors, motherboards, daughter-cards (network, graphics, sound), hard disk, memory, monitors, keyboards, mouse, system software (O/S, DBMS) and application software (word processor, spreadsheet, accounting, games) emerged. All these developments demonstrate that there is so much action on the PC front.Įver since the introduction of the IBM PC on April 2, 1981, the PC market has been growing by leaps and bounds. In October, Microsoft launched Windows XP Starter Pack in Thailand to bring down the cost of Last month saw the launch of PIC (Personal Internet Communicator) in India and Brazil by the microprocessor company AMD as a low cost alternative to the IBM PC. HCL announced last week the launch of RP2, an innovative power solution for its Busybee range of HCL branded PCs.
IBM took everyone by surprise this week with its decision to sell the PC division to the Chinese company Lenovo (previously Legend computers) for $1.25 billion.
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