I dunno, i have 2 IBM Deskstar hard drives and they've been excellent performers. Still running.
Either way, there's an odd disconnect between a company's R&D department and their hardware manufacturing. It seems that the companies that are hardcore R&D usually have poor sales and track records when it comes to manufacturing their own devices. IBM, Bell Labs (LUCENT), etc are good examples. Their forte is in design and development, not device making and sales
Nvidia is an example of a company that realizes this. They make the GPU that rocks the 3D world, yet they don't bother making their own brand of video cards....there's too many 3rd party manufacturers out there that are setup to do it and will do it for them. So instead of dropping resources on manufacturing and advertisement, they spend it all in the R&D. Quite a nice arrangement really.
AMD and Intel, same thing...they make CPU's, not whole systems. Intel branched off into "Ambient technologies" which makes modems and some other things, but the brunt of that business is wholly separate from the CPU R&D department that we all associate with the Intel name.
So, to chide IBM for their brand of hard drives, etc might be on the money in terms of those specific devices, but it says nothing about the capability of their R&D labs. Besides, SOMEONE has to do it first and it usually doesn't matter who these days. Once they field these things, you can bet there will be any number of other companies that will do the same thing.
