Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...large companies have wholly adopted a four-day schedule, but Armour & Co. did so this month at its food-freezing plant in Fairmont, Minn., and hopes to make similar changes at other plants. Chrysler Corp. and the United Auto Workers have agreed to study the possibility, and even giant IBM is taking a new look at the work week, including the possibility of putting some or all of its 157,000 U.S. employees on a four-day routine. Two insurance companies, Mutual of New York and Metropolitan Life, have gone further: their computer staffs work three 12-hr. days...
Price War. Despite such doubts among their customers, the major producers of computer hardware-IBM, Burroughs, Control Data, RCA, NCR, Sperry Rand-have all brought out new products within the last year. Many of them are so-called "fourth generation" computers: incredibly complex instruments of astronomical calculating power. In fact, they make the original Univac I look like an abacus by comparison. Last week Honeywell-G.E. introduced its Series 6000 line of fourth-generation models (price: up to $4,500,000), which can execute 1,000,000 instructions a second...
Simultaneously, the first big price war has flared in the computer industry. Under antitrust pressure, IBM last year decided to abandon the single-price, machine-plus-service package that had helped the company gain 70% of the U.S. computer market. The "unbundling" left IBM customers free to shop around for bargains in systems-engineering, programming and employee education. Customers had always been able to buy peripheral equipment-the storage and retrieval units that speed data into and out of the machines-from competitors offering prices up to 15% below IBM's. But unbundling illuminated the disparity. By year...
Stung by the loss of business, IBM struck back by introducing new peripherals with prices 10% to 35% lower than comparable existing models. On top of that, IBM filed a lawsuit against Memorex, a large peripheral maker, alleging use of IBM trade secrets. The company also brought out a model of its new System/370 that can be equipped with its own disk drive, making it difficult for a user to add a competitor's gadget. The independents have retaliated with price cuts of their own, and more are expected...
DAVID GROVE, vice president and chief economist for IBM...