IBM Compatible

The decreasing influence of IBM

By 1983, IBM had about 25% of sales of personal computers between $1,000 and $10,000, and computers with some PC compatibility were another 25%. The president of a company that sold compatibles for $2000 wholesale told PC that they could still be profitable at $1000 wholesale. As the market and competition grew IBM's influence diminished. Writing that even "IBM has to continue to be IBM compatible", in November 1985 PC Magazine stated "Now that it has created the [PC] market, the market doesn't necessarily need IBM for the machines. It may depend on IBM to set standards and to develop higher-performance machines, but IBM had better conform to existing standards so as to not hurt users". Observers noted IBM's silence when the industry that year quickly adopted the expanded memory standard, created by Lotus and Intel without its participation; PC Tech Journal wrote, "This must be embarrassing ... IBM didn't deliver. Intel and its partners did", and InfoWorld said that the company would not be able to introduce its own standard "without creating utter chaos in the market". In January 1987, Bruce Webster wrote in Byte of rumors that IBM would introduce proprietary personal computers with a proprietary operating system: "Who cares? If IBM does it, they will most likely just isolate themselves from the largest marketplace, in which they really can't compete anymore anyway". He predicted that in 1987 the market "will complete its transition from an IBM standard to an Intel/MS-DOS/expansion bus standard ... Folks aren't so much concerned about IBM compatibility as they are about Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility". By 1992, Macworld stated that because of clones, "IBM lost control of its own market and became a minor player with its own technology".