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A comment on Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion. Parent comment

Re:Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion by tensor on Thursday January 23, 2014 @12:44PM (#7109709)
Snapchat is an entertainment product. It could go away tomorrow and the world would be just fine. On the other hand, losing all our server products would be catastrophic. Fortunately, this will never happen because servers are important. Should they become scarce, they would quickly become a very lucrative business resulting in an increasing supply.

IBMs servers may not be as good as the competition, but to compare them to an entertainment product is silly.

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Re:Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion by tomasien on Thursday January 23, 2014 @03:23PM (#7110943)
That's ridiculous - you just said "Snapchat is an entertainment product, it could go away tomorrow and the world would be just fine" - IBM's servers could go away tomorrow and the world would ALSO be just fine - unless you LITERALLY mean they disappear without time to replace or back them up, but I don't think that's your point.

If ALL Entertainment products were gone tomorrow, the world would NOT be just fine it would be SHIT. Just like if ALL servers went away, which is what you jumped to.

Snapchat, incidentally, is not an entertainment product anymore than texting is an entertainment product. It's an entertaining communication product.

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Re:Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion by rbanffy on Thursday January 23, 2014 @01:05PM (#7109858)
You can easily replace an IBM server with any other comparable x86 machine. You can't easily replace Snapchat and the user networks it hosts with another similar service.
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Re:Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion by tensor on Thursday January 23, 2014 @01:24PM (#7110009)
My point is that as a class of product, Snapchat could disappear and not be replaced and no critical infrastructure would halt nor any innovation or science be stopped. At worst you would have some grumpy people.

It's silly to compare this to a product class that is crucial to our society and claim that it is better. The relative worth of one server to another is one thing, but the class of server products is infinitely more important than the class social picture sharing products.

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Re:Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion by lotso on Thursday January 23, 2014 @04:50PM (#7111486)
Would you also say Facebook could disappear tomorrow without "any innovation or science be stopped" ? That seems like a silly way of determining if something has value or not.
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