IBM isn't stupid. They sold a part of their company that was history. IBM will move on and continue to be successful. The Chinese will make money on the venture, but only by producing PC's at half the price of Compaq/HP. The Asians are copiers, and good copiers at that. In the West, we are the inventors. We invented the PC, perfected it, produced it, but now it's time to move on. This is way capitalism is working right now. Some people don't like it, but we are still on top. For now.
I think that offshoring labor has some fascinating parallels with disruptive technologies. I wonder if China is the disruptive "technology", coming in to scoop up all the low-end, low margin markets, with American companies like IBM gratefully ceding their money-losing low-end product lines and concentrating on the higher-end, higher-margin lines for a higher rate of return.
If this is so, then it doesn't bode well in the long run for the US companies that get pushed into these niche markets by the upstart Chinese. But from the standpoint of the employees it's not necessarily the end of the world - if there are new, innovative US companies they can migrate to. These new US companies may themselves be working on disruptive technologies in the more classical sense.
Can the disruptive technology model be extended to countries or economies as a whole? I dunno. I suppose in the general sense that China is a country full of cheap labor and we're full of expensive, highly trained, productive, & creative labor. Does this mean we've been marginalizing ourselves as an economy as we pursued higher-margin market segments across the board? I dunno.
Anyway, Japan started out in China's position after WWII and ended up a relatively high-wage country after just a few decades. I don't hear too much anguish over Japan stealing American jobs these days.
One point some analyst made recently: China has little experience in managing a free economy. What's going to happen when they encounter the inevitable recession, currency crisis, or whatever? Chances are their government & central bank are not going to handle it well. Chances are they'll screw it up & create a depression for themselves. I wonder what kind of repercussions that would have (good or bad) for us when the inevitable happens. Hmmm...
Right. Away with these buggywhip industries like computers. They're only good for things like building businesses, national defense, weapons simulations, all that kind of useless stuff. We don't need that anymore. We can trust the Chinese and whoever else is out there not to blow us up.
Move on, yes. I hear Hardee's is coming out with a new Monster Thickburger. Plenty of burger-building jobs for those displaced EEs and system engineers.