Computing giant IBM has a new name and a new strategy for capturing market share in the PC business

Currently, the PC inventor's market share languishes in third place behind Dell and Hewlett Packard with less than half their worldwide sales, writes Steve Malone. IBM admits that companies like Dell have been better at selling computers at a lower cost and making it easier to buy and has vowed to catch up in these areas. However, like many of the larger vendors, IBM has been talking to its big accounts and has come up with a set of strategies that it claims takes a lot of the pain out of running and maintaining perhaps hundreds or thousands of PCs across a company. The relaunch of the Personal Computing Division is backed by a renaming of the entire PC product range around its most successful brand name, the ThinkPad. Thus, the NetVista range will now be called ThinkCentres and the monitors ThinkVision. To that end, IBM has come up with a set of technologies which it claims will make life easier. The services are collectively known as ThinkVantage. The services consist of four technologies addressing four basic problem areas IBM has identified.