Re: A long time in the planning?
The reason IBM sold the hard disk business is this:
Back then, hard disks increased storage capacity at a very high pace. So, if you extrapolate the development, IBM drew the conclusion that in a few years, there will be 500GB disks which could store everything you could imagine. So it would suffice with one single disk to store everything a small team could produce. So you would not need to buy as many drives anymore. One disk would suffice. And this is true today; all documents, source code, etc a small team can produce will easily fit into a 2TB disk today. Even a larger team, or maybe, the entire Linux source code with all revisions back to the very beginning, would fit into a 2TB disk. So, why would IBM keep manufacturing hard disks? They would be too good and large in a couple of years. Better sell the hard disk division while IBM could get a high price for it. That is the reason.
IBM manegement reasoned uncorrectly. They reasoned something like this: future cpus will be much faster than today, so one cpu will suffice for many people. Better sell off the cpu division now.
The fallacy is this: the more cpu power one gets, the more demanding applications they run. In the same vein, the more storage one gets, the more data they run. No matter how much cpu or storage you get, you will always find a use for it.
"Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh."