[ltp] Re: Bad news for us ...

[Andrew Barr]

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On Saturday 03 June 2006 20:25, Kris Steenhaut wrote:
> As you are assigning R50/R51 to Lenovo, your comments can't be taken
> serious I'm afraid.

I meant machines that were manufactured before and after the Lenovo takeover. 
The R51 I own was purchased in March 2005. Lenovo completed their takeover in 
May/June 2005 (IIRC). The R50e was purchased in September 2005. You must be 
referring to IBM-designed models versus Lenovo-designed models. 

> You'll be bying Lenovo laptops, of which you are entitled too of course.

Yes, I'm not sure why that's bad.

What I heard about the Lenovo takeover of IBM's personal computing division 
has sounded good--they got everything that was associated with the division; 
people, facilities, etc. It was not a simple purchase of a name brand. I have 
yet to see any concrete reason not to keep buying Thinkpads and expect that I 
will get a machine just like the two we have right now.

I suspect much of the hand-wringing over the Lenovo takeover has turned into a 
bad case of self-fufilling prophecy for some in the Linux community. Frankly, 
I'm starting to get tired of seeing this come up every few months over the 
tiniest mention of Lenovo and/or ThinkPad in the tech press. Then we have to 
discuss if Lenovo has been good or bad for ThinkPads. Frankly it's way too 
early to tell. Lenovo only completed the takeover a year ago. We've spent way 
too much time discussing Lenovo's every move, whether or not it has any 
significance whatsoever.

I'm taking the long view of this. I'm going to wait and see what happens and 
draw my conclusions from 20/20 hindsight.

> A proposito: it's easy to keep the IBM and Lenovo a part: if there are
> no Windy keys, it's still IBM, and if there are Windy keys, it's 100%
> Lenovo. As easy as that.

I never understood the attention that was paid to the addition of Windows keys 
to the ThinkPad keyboard. It sounds like they had to make some other keys 
smaller to do it, which is bad, but it's really no big deal. Perhaps there's 
a symbolic significance to it but again they're just keys on the keyboard.

- -- 
Andrew Barr | andrew.james.barr@gmail.com
http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/

"And now for something completely different."
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