Bloomberg have reported that IBM’s value yesterday reached $214 billion while Microsoft’s fell slightly to $213.2 billion.  IBM has been steadily gaining on Microsoft in the last year by adding 22% to its overall value, while Microsoft’s value has seen a drop of 8.8% in the same period.

This isn’t at all surprising given the drive towards the cloud now for all technology companies and the servers required to get their presences there being supplied predominantly by only a few major firms, of which IBM has always been a leader.  We could probably see Fujitsu, HP and others significantly climb in value too in the next couple of years, again off the back of the move to the cloud.

Microsoft’s business focuses predominantly on Windows, Windows Server and Office with other aspects of the company’s products, namely their Bing search engine and their Xbox gaming division being propped up by revenue from the company’s traditionally strong products.  With very few exceptions Microsoft have never made hardware and certainly haven’t got into the server market.

This is the first time that IBM has topped Microsoft in value since 1996 and is now the fourth-largest company in the world by market value.  IBM sold their own PC division to a Chinese company in 2005 and HP also now look set to sell their own PC division to concentrate on the prospering server market.  IBM could clearly see which way the wind was blowing.  While the rest of the world believed that processing was coming down from servers onto the desktop, they stuck to their ground and were soon proved correct that processing would continue to be done on servers and, indeed this market would grow significantly.  In an interview with Bloomberg, Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research siad “They were early to recognize that computing was moving way beyond these boxes on our desks.”

Microsoft are still the world’s largest software company but in 2000 were worth three times the value of IBM.  This shows just how much IBM’s business has grown in that time, and the company has announced plans to grow their business even further by 2015.  Back in the summer of 2000, Microsoft was valued at $430 billion but dropped to $135 billion in 2009 at the height of the economic downturn.

Microsoft will continue to be a dominant player in the market but the rise of alternative operating systems from Google and Apple have proven that it’s no longer all about the operating system you run, as I point out in an article today on our sister site Windows8News.  This move then does not mean that Microsoft won’t still be a technology giant ten years from now.  They may still see this dominant place slip however and could be number five by the end of next year.

Pointing out that no single device had taken over, instead we were seeing a number of devices based on the “socially-mediated innovation” that has been developed in the last few years.  The IBM 5150 was launched on August 12th 1981.  In his post, Dean said ”When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline.”  He noted with some sadness that his own primary computer was now a tablet.

It’s amazing to me to think that August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. The announcement helped launch a phenomenon that changed the way we work, play and communicate.  Little did we expect to create an industry that ultimately peaked at more than 300 million unit sales per year. I’m proud that I was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed the first machine and was fortunate to have lead subsequent IBM PC designs through the 1980s.

He went on to comment that ”It’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact, it is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives.”

IBM itself moved away from the desktop PC market some years ago after losing out to companies such as HP and Dell.  It eventually sold it’s laptop business to the Chinese and now concentrates on the server market.  The company still maintains revenues higher than Microsoft for the server hardware that it sells.

It is amazing when you think about it, that PCs are still with us.  The colours might have changed, but the traditional box and keyboard haven’t changed much at all in the last 30 years.  I personally remember using one of the original IBM PCs extensively in my youth, though I preferred the Apple II for it’s compactness (it weighed nearly 30 by 45 by 12 cm and weighed 11.5 lbs).  Eventually my father bought me a second hand Olivetti XT machine from his work with a copy of WordPerfect 5.1 and this was my first proper PC.

Around 400 million PCs are sold each year and it may be that Dean’s prediction is premature.  Business is still the largest users of PCs worldwide and businesses have a long-earned reputation for moving very slowly with new technologies.  Given the additional software development costs they face it’s very likely that the traditional desktop PC will still be a feature of offices around the globe for two decades to come.

That said, consumers are now moving towards tablets and other devices including smartphones and netbooks as their main computer.  Only serious content creators and hard core gamers still evangelise about the PC in the way we used to last decade.

So who knows at this point what the future holds for the humble desktop PC.  Certainly we will see them commonly morph into all-in-one machines but battery technology still isn’t good enough to convince the masses to switch to portable and mobile devices.  While tablets such as the iPad can boast impressive battery lives of up to 16 hours on a single charge, most devices will still run out of power after four.

So, happy 30th birthday to the IBM 5150, you started a revolution that has impacted positively on mankind, generated incalculable numbers of jobs in all manner of industries, and that has even created hundreds of new industries in the process.

It might be worth noting though, all things considered, that I’m writing this article on a Google Chromebook.

The face-off took place on live TV over the last couple of night and the good news for IBM is that Watson won against its two Human competitors winning $77,147 against the lowly $24,000 and $21,600 from the competition.  Watson said that it would be giving its $1,000,000 winnings to charity.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll be having conversations with our computers any time soon or that they’ll be taking over the world and destroying all Humans, this was a test of a system that’s taken IBM’s researchers years to develop.  Those same researchers will now be taking the data from Watson’s first public outing and pouring over it to find ways to fine tune the heuristics and locate flaws in the system.

We can now probably expect Watson to be taking on more challenges in the coming years so it will inevitably be popping up elsewhere.  Technology like this in the future could bring a whole new horrible dimension to talking to a computer system on the telephone and it will be truly fascinating to see how this technology evolves and is used.  I can imagine there would be excellent opportunities for the technology to help the disabled and infirm.

IBM has had a huge impact on the world of computing and the company continues to be a big player, in fact it currently makes more money than Microsoft.

To mark their centenary, IBM have commissioned a special 30 minute documentary, which you can see on their YouTube channel.  The music is by acclaimed musician Philip Glass.

The documentary covers IBM’s culture, some of it’s achievements and company highlights and talks about the technological future of the company.

The prize fund on the night will be $1m, though it’s unclear at this time what the computer would spend it on if it won.

The contest is the first since 1997 when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue took on chess master Garry Kasparov and defeated him.

IBM have decided on the move to field test the new artificial intelligence unit in the machine.  ”The big challenge we see here is helping people really appreciate the power and limits of the technology we are developing with Watson,” Dr David Ferrucci, IBM’s chief scientist of Watson computing told BBC News.

Watson, which was named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson, aims to mimic human intelligence by “deciphering and answering questions without being connected to the Internet”, which already gives it one plus over the rest of us!

It will be interesting to see how well the computer performs understanding natural language and conversing with the gameshow’s host.

Jeopardy is seen as the ultimate challenge in the artificial intelligence world because the game’s clues involve analysing subtle meanings, irony, riddles and other complexities where humans excel and machines do not.  Dr Ferrucci said the tough part for Watson is that it has to “know what it knows with utmost confidence”.

Watson is busy preparing for the big event by practicing against former Jeopardy winners.  So far it has played 55 games though IBM is keeping quiet about how well it is doing.

Now IBM sees a developing market for more cost-effective solutions to the Microsoft Windows/Office combination. This solution (for which I hope they find a better name than “IBM Client for Smart Work”) will consist of:

• Lotus Symphony
• Lotus Live
• Lotus Notes

The difference between the Red Hat and Ubuntu versions is quite interesting. On the Ubuntu side the Lotus tools will be doled out via cloud. On the Red Hat side all tools will be on the desktop. To me this is smart marketing because it brings both Linux distributions together to work on a single project, but doesn’t pit each distribution against one another.

I believe that both of these solutions seems sound as well as outstanding alternatives to the current Windows environment. But what about the meat of the issue – the office suite? Does it work? Can it stand up to all the competition? This is where you decided. I will show you how this office suite is installed/used and you can kick those tires and see if it is a worthy opponent.

Installing

The first thing you need to do is go to the Symphony download page and download the version of the suite for your distribution. You will have to agree to a license as well as enter your name, email address, etc.

You can download for Windows, OS X, or Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE). The Ubuntu file will be a .deb file and both the Red Hat and SuSE files will be .rpm files.

Once you have downloaded the file you will open a terminal window, change into the directory containing the file, and issue one of these commands:

• sudo dpkg -i symphony*
• rpm install -ivh symphony*

The former command for Ubuntu and the latter command for either Red Hat or SuSE.

You will have to agree to a license during the install, but other than that the installation is a piece of cake.

Post installation

Once Symphony is installed, you can start the suite from the command line by issuing the command:

symphony

Or you will find a menu entry in the Office sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Symphony consists of three parts:

• Word processor
• Spreadsheet
• Presentations

Figure 1

You can not start the tools separately (reminiscent of the old Star Office suite) so when Symphony starts you will be presented with the Symphony desktop (see Figure 1).

From this desktop you can pretty much do anything you need. From creating a new file (click the icon associated with the type of file you want to work with) or open an existing file from the File menu.

I’m fairly confident that anyone reading this site can work their way around the basics of an office suite, so I won’t go into the details of how to use Symphony. In later articles I will discuss some of the “power features” of Lotus Symphony.

Final thoughts

If IBM plays their cards right they can take the Smart Work desktop and turn it into something that could seriously compete with Windows. This of course would be more in line with enterprise usage and not home/personal usage. I look forward to seeing how IBM continues their presence on the Linux desktop.

This is why experts suggest to either overwrite the hard drive with random data before formatting it or running tools like Eraser to erase all data on the hard drive.

The HDD Low Level Format Tool will low level format a hard drive erasing the whole disk surface in the process which has the result, that it is impossible to restore data afterwards. It supports SATA, IDE, SCSI, USB, FIREWIRE and Big drives (LBA-48) and the most popular manufacturers Maxtor, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, Quantum and Western Digital.

I did not try that hard drive software yet because I do not have a spare hard drive lying around that I could use to test it with and I did not want to format one of my hard drives just for the sake of testing it. If any of you do test the software let me know about the results please. Running a recovery tool like Recuva after formatting the hard drive should show us if the data is really not recoverable.