John Markoff writes about IBM’s sale of its disk drive business to Hitachi.
Brings back memories. I worked for IBM for almost 20 years early in my career. I left in 1985 to join Visa International.
When I left IBM, I was Product and Business Planning Manager for IBM’s San Jose Laboratory. We were the folks who did all of the planning, pricing, and go to market work involved in bringing IBM’s high-end DASD storage products to market.
So, it’s a sad day when I think about IBM exiting that business — it actually made more profits for IBM during that period than the Poughkeepsie/Kingston mainframe business did! IBM sold it to Hitachi for just over $2 Billion — seems like a relative pittance.
The IBM San Jose Lab and what’s now called the IBM Almaden Research Center spawned all of the disk drive companies in existence today — those IBM two labs truly were national treasures in technology.