IBM Exec: 'My Primary Computer Now a Tablet'

August 11, 2011 8:59 AM EDT Send to a Friend
One International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) executive may have been forward thinking when working and innovating the first PCs some 30 years ago, and has just had another revelation which may shake the industry yet again.

PC's may be going the way of the dinosaur.

Okay, so the revelation isn't new. But the engineer, Mark Dean, who holds three of nine patents for the original IBM PC and is currently Chief Technology Officer for the burgeoning Middle East and Africa IBM unit, certainly knows what he's talking about.

According to CNET and his own IBM-sponsored blog post, Dean has shifted from a PC and his "primary computer now is a tablet."

IBM sold it's PC division to Lenovo in 2005 in making its full-fledged effort to innovate in other areas of consumer and enterprise electronics. Dean quips on the blog, "Over the past 10 years, in addition to leaving the PC business, we also exited disk drives and printers. We invest heavily in R&D, about a $6 billion per year–producing major breakthroughs such as the question-and-answer technology in the Watson computer, which in February defeated former champions on the game show Jeopardy! At the same time, we're building up service and software capabilities through acquisitions, especially in analytics."

Of course, CNET points out this is not the first time a visionary at IBM has made the claim. In a 1999 article, then IBM CEO Lou Gerstner made a similar claim.

Whether you use a tablet full-time, part-time or never, with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) aiming to solidify its position as the most valuable company in the world and it's iPad and iPad 2 causing competitors to drop what they're doing and create a comparable device, it looks like tablets are only going to get better and better as time passes.


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