PCs really cost IBM its total control of the computer industry. Very few people I know use an IBM PC.
You may be right, I think they now do more with laptops than PCs.
Although we do kid in this house about all our PC's being IBM.........my husband built them all, and he works for IBM. LOL!!! But none of the parts came from IBM.
Intel servers with used IBM notebooks provide all of my computing horsepower. Little if any need to cost justify a Dell Precision 690 for my IT business. When a notebook crashes I simply throw it out like a disposable TV and buy another.
The original PC was an IBM attempt to get into the home computer market then dominated by the Apple II and a host of CP/M machines.
Rather than going through the usual IBM design process, which had already failed to design an affordable microcomputer (for example the failed IBM 5100), a special team was assembled with authorization to bypass normal company restrictions and get something to market rapidly. This project was given the code name Project Chess.
The team consisted of just twelve people headed by Don Estridge. They succeeded — development of the PC took about a year. To achieve this they first decided to build the machine with "off-the-shelf" parts from a variety of different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and countries. Previously IBM had developed their own components. Second, they decided on an open architecture so that other manufacturers could produce and sell compatible machines — the IBM PC compatibles, so the specification of the ROM BIOS was published. IBM hoped to maintain their position in the market by royalties from licensing the BIOS, and by keeping ahead of the competition.
At the time, Don Estridge and his team considered using the 801 processor and its operating system that had been developed at the IBM research laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York (The 801 was an early RISC microprocessor designed by John Cocke and his team at Yorktown Heights.) The 801 was at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the Intel 8088, and the operating system many years more advanced than the DOS operating system from Microsoft, that were finally selected. Ruling out an in-house solution made the team’s job much easier and may have avoided a delay in the schedule, but the ultimate consequences of this decision for IBM were disastrous.
Unfortunately for IBM, other manufacturers rapidly reverse engineered the BIOS to produce their own royalty-free versions. Columbia Data Products produced the Multi Personal Computer, the first IBM-PC compatible computer. Compaq Computer Corporation announced the first portable IBM PC compatible in November 1982 (it did not ship until March 1983) — the Compaq Portable.
Once the IBM PC became a commercial success the PC came back under the usual IBM management control, with the result that competitors had little trouble taking the lead from them. (In this regard, IBM's tradition of "rationalizing" their product lines—deliberately restricting the performance of lower-priced models in order to prevent them from "cannibalizing" profits from higher-priced models—worked against them).
As of June 2006, IBM PC and XT models are still in use at the majority of U.S. National Weather Service upper-air observing sites. The computers are used to process data as it is returned from the ascending radiosonde, attached to a weather balloon. They are being phased out over a several year period, to be replaced by the Radiosonde Replacement System.