International Business Machines
International Business Machines (Commonly known as IBM) is a large American computer technology and consulting company, founded in 1889. Although the Term "IBM compatible" is widely used to indicate that a computer can use the Microsoft Windows Operating System, the personal computer manufacturing arm of IBM was sold to the Chinese company Lenovo in 2005 in return giving IBM an 18.9% ownership stake in Lenovo Group which makes IBM the second largest shareholder following the Chinese government[1]. This move gave IBM a crucial foothold in the very large Chinese IT market. IBM currently sells computer hardware and software while continuing to offer infrastructure and consulting services for other businesses.
IBM is also a strong advocate[2] for the GNU/Linux operating system. This advocacy followed on the heels of IBM's failure to gain wide acceptance for its' OS/2 personal desktop operating system. In 2005 IBM stated that OS/2 users should consider migration to Linux[3]. Some OS/2 users and marketers created a rebranded OS/2 called eComStation with the permission of IBM. The eComStation operating system runs previous OS/2 applications as well as new applications ported from Open Source projects. Further development of eComStation continues by third parties to keep eComStation running on newer hardware.