Tierce de Picardie
All the dust settled at GBD today. I though the deal had fallen through when there were no news items by 7:00 last evening. I wasn’t far off the thought processes. Apparently management had considered scuttling it if a basic agreement wasn’t reached by last Sunday since the NYT leak had blown the cover and all the corporate customers knew something was in the works. Nobody liked it. Rumors of megabuck contracts being put on hold or cancelled outright. A joint conference with the company formerly known as Legend (and whose current name means “thought” in Chinese) was set for 4:00pm but that kept getting pushed back. Then at 8:49pm EST the deal was struck and the teleconference went live for the announcement. It was on the news by 10.
Yuanqing Yang, chief executive of “Thought” was either attempting to be humorous or might have been mistranslated when he said the GBD VP in charge of the PC Company would be the CEO of Thought “as long as he did a good job.” It turns out the holdup was for arrangements with the NYSE and Hong Kong stock exchange, where Thought shares currently trade – except when trading in them is halted as it was Monday and Tuesday until full disclosure.
Okay, now I can say that GBD=IBM and Thought=Lenovo. All IBM employees of PCD will become Lenovo employees come March 1, 2004. That’s not necessarily bad. Lenovo gets the IBM brand on personal computers for the next 5 years as well as the thoroughly burnished sales and support team. IBM, for its roughly 19% share, gets access to the China market for PCs which is growing at a 7% annual rate. Unlike Dell and HP, the new company will not be subject to import duties, which will give them an edge there. For the record, the Chinese government, basically through “The Academy Of Science,” will own 45% of the new Lenovo. The remaining shares will be publicly traded in the US, either NASDAQ or NYSE. The new company will have headquarters in New York, but it has not been decided whether it will be based in the US or The Netherlands. All US employees keep their current salaries and “comparable” benefits to be disclosed later.
Since the US market for PCs is currently being described “saturated” (a term I last heard just before the tech bubble broke in early 2000), this probably gives us a measure of job security a notch above what it would have been had this not happened. Job scares happen about every 18 months at GBD (I think I’ll call them that until April 1 – and I hope this all hasn’t been an elaborate and sadistic April Fools gag). Some of them hit closer to home than others. The rumors usually delineate who is in danger and who isn’t. I’ve been through so many I live in semi-permanent shellshock. It’s no fun to see half your building empty out due to layoffs, as I have several times. The rumors were quasi-reassuring this time because ThinkPad (I hope it doesn’t become ThoughtPad) has been a high profit product. It gets us through corporate doors so we can sell other products and services. The rumors said it wasn’t on the chopping block. Then that NYT article hit and it said everything. Holy Shit! What a miserable weekend! I’ve dodged all the previous bullets, but it sure looked like this on had my name on it.
It has been for me what Queen Elizabeth II termed an annus horribilis for the Royal Family after Chuck & Di split up. It seemed to me that the only appropriate ending was to lose my job just before Christmas. The whole year has been sad, in a minor key, maybe even Phrygian mode with its opening minor second leading into a minor third. The minor second that should forcefully resolve to the tonic, the leading tone, is an ironic major second in Phrygian. That’s the ending I expected. Instead, I got a major chord.
8:08:15 PM 
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