Let’s talk innovation says Big Blue

Call it the battle royal for #1 position in the coun-try’s notebook market,
but the Big Blue prefers to call it ‘tech-nology innovation’. The recent
launch of the two notebook ranges–ThinkPad R50 and T41–by IBM in India not
only aims at refreshing the market, it also for the first time brings leading
global biggies–Intel, Microsoft and Cisco–together on a single platform to
support the technical innovation deri-ved by IBM.

The new notebooks features, what the company calls as IBM Active Protection
System or the world’s first automatic hard drive protection technology,
designed specifically to prevent hard drive crashes and data loss. The new
security feature incorporated in the operating systems by Microsoft will not
only boost notebook performa-nce, it would also ensure users don’t lose
critical data despite hard disk failure.

The products also boast of Intel’s Centrino Mobile Techno-logy that gives
them inbuilt wireless capability beside the much talked about Hyper Threading
technology. What’s more, IBM has announced that all its new wireless models
would be compatible with Cisco wireless access points. That IBM plans to take
its note-book technology innovation to the segments that matter most–big
educational institu-tes and corporate where any-way it has a big market share–is
a given, but will all this really help the company acquire the #1 position in
India, which it has been eyeing for quite some time now? Ask IBM India personal
computing division VP Alok Ohrie and he would say that the company is not into
the number game. "It doesn’t matter much where we are and where we will
be. The impor-tant thing for us is to update our products with new techno-logies,"
he reiterated.

According to latest IDC rep-ort, while IBM enjoys the sec-ond position with
28 percent market share after HP, which has a 31 percent share of the Indian
notebook market, the company has not been able make much dent in the
lower-priced market traditionally served by Toshiba and HP. By not getting into
the price war and into the sub-Rs 50,000-category notebook, IBM has also
conveyed that it would pre-fer to remain the pricey darling of the corporate
world where the dominance of ThinkPads has been typically boosting up its bottom
lines. Its strategy finds support amongst certain analysts who suggest that in a
country like India where note-book penetration is one fourth of PC penetration,
it’s a better idea to target the niche segment.

Rahul Gupta

(CyberMedia News Service)