Why Did Ibm Decide Develop The Model 5150 - 1320 Words

ïÆ'Ëœ Why did IBM decide to develop the Model 5150? Was there a strategic purpose for the company to do so? IBM was already a big name in the market of mini, middle range and mainframe computers. The perspective and promising small computer market, greatly gaining ground due to Apple II and other few, was still a difficult task despite their multi-millionaire efforts. IBM decided to develop the model 5150 on the lines of their first PC model 5100, which was pretty unaffordable for large masses. Apple had already launched their first PC back in 1976 at a very affordable $666.66. To influence and gain wide acceptance in PC market IBM needed to come up with something unique and economical and rest would have been taken care of by IBM’s big name.†¦show more content†¦The development team consisting of about a dozen people started to build a prototype to take to a little known company called Microsoft. The team finished their task mostly by April, 1981. The manufacturing team then took over to simplify everything and on August12, 1981, at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York city, Estridge announced the IBM PC with a price tag of $1,565. ïÆ'Ëœ Why did IBM choose to collaborate with other companies to develop the necessary technology, hardware, and software for the Model 5150? IBM had designed and made nearly everything it sold till the moment when BILL LOWE got the permission to develop the new small computer model within a year. To meet the due deadline along with the priority of keeping the price low, the development team turned towards a number of outside contributors for the necessary technology, hardware and software for the model 5150. The pretested and individual expertise of outside contributors gave the team a necessary time window to achieve their task in. This also lead to the reduction in the price for 5150 model which was multiple times less than the previous products that IBM ever sold. Microsoft provided operating system (QDOS, renamed PC-DOS), Intel provided 8088 processor. IBM choose an existing monitor from IBM Japan and a dot- matrix printer by Epson. The keyboard and