The Computer Industry Is Buzzing : What’s IBM Going to Pop Up With in the Way of PCs on April 2?

Computer retailers, hardware and software manufacturers in San Diego are circling April 2 on their calendars. That red-letter date is when industry bellwether International Business Machines Corp. is expected to introduce a new line of personal computers, an event shaping up as one of the most important happenings in the personal computer industry in five years.

Clues are mounting that a major product announcement is on the way. Among them is the fact that IBM has summoned its largest retail dealers, including the owners of five San Diego ComputerLand stores, to Miami on April 2 for what many expect will be a preview of the new product line.

Though saying he has no firm knowledge of new IBM products, San Diego ComputerLand partner Ed Michelson said new products are a good bet.

“In my 18 years in the computer business, I have yet to see an IBM dealer meeting where new products were not released,” Michelson said. “It’s the only reason they have them.”

He predicted that IBM’s machines probably will be on display at the One Computer Show for Every Business, an annual computer trade show opening in San Diego April 9.

Though the substance of IBM’s announcement is shrouded in mystery, speculation is that IBM will introduce products that will address a host of industry issues and markets, including desk-top publishing, the DOS operating system, Intel’s powerful 80386 microprocessor chip, and smaller, higher-density disk drives.

But perhaps the most pressing issue to be addressed, and one that may affect San Diego computer companies most, is IBM’s “open architecture,” the non-proprietary computer design standards that enabled a host of peripherals and software companies to support IBM products and participate in the personal computer boom over the first half of this decade.

Over the past year, IBM’s open architecture has boomeranged, causing it to lose PC market share to manufacturers of cheaply made “clones” that have taken advantage of IBM’s readily available product standards to become low-cost producers of nearly identical machines. IBM’s loss of market share leads several local computer executives to expect that IBM will introduce “proprietary” features that will make life much more difficult for future clones.

Peripherals and software manufacturers may be faced with the choice of supporting what many observers anticipate will be IBM’s new set of proprietary standards or sticking with the existing open architecture, betting that the huge installed base of IBM-compatible machines insures an ongoing market.

“Software publishers like ourselves will have to decide whether we are going to write software to support the peculiarities of new IBM machines or treat IBM as generic industry standards, which IBM has been for the past several years,” said Paul Stannard, president of Megahaus Corp., a Sorrento Valley manufacturer of First Impression, an IBM-compatible desk-top publishing software package.

If most software and peripherals manufacturers follow IBM’s new proprietary standards, then clones will suffer, Stannard said. But IBM also runs a risk: if IBM’s new machines are priced too high, companies like Megahaus will be reluctant to jump on IBM’s bandwagon.

David Kay, president of Kaypro Corp., a Solana Beach-based personal computer manufacturer that has converted virtually its entire line to IBM compatibility over the last 18 months, said the industry is making a mistake in thinking IBM can lead the industry as it once did. Recent IBM products such as the Peanut and the IBM RT, for example, “have not been popular.”

“Even if IBM does something proprietary, there is sufficient inertia in the market that there will be more than sufficient time for Kaypro to respond to whatever they come out with, if in fact a response is even needed,” Kay said. Also in the clones’ favor is the imperative that IBM’s products be, to a degree, “downward compatible,” or able to accommodate software and peripherals that ran on the old IBM models, Kay said.

Stannard and other executives said a major IBM product announcement will be beneficial in the sense that it will clear the air for many computer consumers. Companies in desk-top publishing have been waiting for months for IBM to say what sort of system it will support. IBM clarified a major desk-top publishing issue last week when it announced at a trade show that it would support Postcript page description language, the language already used in the Apple Macintosh computer-based desk-top publishing system.

“Customers’ first question when looking at our (desk-top publishing) products is, what is IBM going to do and is your software going to work with it?” Stannard said.

To compete more strongly in the desk-top publishing market, IBM is also expected to introduce higher-resolution graphics capability as well as a low-cost laser printer, said Peter Steiner, senior vice president of Office Automations Systems Inc., a San Diego-based computer printer manufacturer.

“I think you’re going to see the market for desk-top publishing systems really open up once IBM clears the air. We’re really looking forward to it,” Steiner said, in reference to IBM’s anticipated announcement April 2.