WP: IBM Reassures Workers After Milestone China Deal

[DeepModem Mom]

IBM Reassures Workers After Milestone China Deal

By Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 9, 2004; Page E01


....Headquarters for Lenovo's PC business will be in New York, but its principal operations will be in Beijing and here in North Carolina, where 1,900 of the 10,000 IBM employees expected to switch to Lenovo now work.

Issues of globalization are nothing new for this PhD-saturated, pine-tree scented, high-tech office park wedged between Durham, Raleigh and Chapel Hill in the North Carolina piedmont. Already more than half the approximately 40,000 employees here work for multinational firms. But Tuesday's deal represents something different: a major presence for a Chinese firm in a location synonymous with American innovation, all under a U.S. brand that for decades has stood at the frontier of global technological know-how.

The American and Chinese economies have worked themselves into a tight symbiosis in recent years, with U.S. consumer spending underwriting Chinese development, and Chinese banks and investors underwriting U.S. trade and government deficits. Companies like Wal-Mart have built their massive scale largely on the basis of low-price supply contracts from Chinese manufacturers.

Unlike many other partnerships between American and Chinese firms, the Chinese company will ultimately call the shots in the IBM-Lenovo deal. And instead of a strict division of labor in which U.S. scientists and engineers do the innovating while Chinese laborers build the product, the burden of innovating the next generation of computers will be shared across continents. Lenovo will own the ThinkPad line of laptops and ThinkCentre line of desktops and has the right to use the IBM brand for at least five years....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49474-2004Dec8.html

[bullimiami]

1. How can anyone at IBM assure anyone of anything

they dont control the company anymore.

What ever happened to technological security concerns? This should not have been allowed imo.

[Mend]

2. By, By Miss American Pie....

this is so incredibly sad and stupid.

[Chalco]

3. While engaging a contractor

to build an addition out back, he mentioned that a new store had opened up near me that only sold equipment made in China and that it was all cheaper than anything made in the U.S. He said "This country is totally screwed."