
Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business - kiyanwang
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/07/toshiba_sells_last_dynabook_shares/
======
IOT_Apprentice
I worked for Toshiba America. The story is the CEO at the time told his
underlings "I cannot report such earnings to our shareholders". His executives
then went ahead and cooked the books.

Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of
forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about
them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them.

They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to
stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not
generating revenue any longer.

Their cloud and "chip to cloud" plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech
or investment.

Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though
Toshiba's disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that
division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy).

Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with
other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other.

They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the
big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on
till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back
to the company.

The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al.
Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with
an amazing historical legacy.

~~~
jariel
This is a really intriguing artefact of specific cultures. Clearly, there are
benefits to 'Failure is Not Tolerated' cultures, it is interesting how people
can pull rabbits out of hats when they have to.

That said, if they are up against a real wall, they will be pulling the
rabbits out their rears (ie fraud) and it will be a problem.

But then you get a secondary effect: a kind of 'coverup cancer' which spreads
through the social system, nobody willing to let it surface.

The European CEO of Japanese Olympus has a pretty intriguing story about this.
Uncanny stuff about the depth of the fraud, like being in an episode of
Twilight Zone.

The corruption is way, way more than just a few leaders - it's entire networks
of systems and leaders, everyone covering for one another.

I suspect there are vast systematic hidden problems in Japan.

Germany has a little bit of this.

For some cultures, it's hard to understand the actual value of 'Chapter 11'.
It's really an amazing bit of commercial policy that bankruptcy protection.

Someone needs to write a book on all the various ways we hide problems. The US
Fed takes on Trillions of toxic assets. The Canadian economy prints money to
new migrants buying homes as a form of 'spending the future now' in a giant
Ponzi scheme. China makes up numbers willy nilly. Japanese hide it inside
private networks. Etc..

~~~
sn41
The Carlos Ghosn case highlights some of the points you raise about the
arbitrariness and closed-box nature of Japanese nativism.

I have worked for a Japanese client (big firm, I will not name them). I think
it is a miracle that Japanese innovate at all. Their hierarchies are extra
rigid, and promotions are more or less dependent on seniority. It was
difficult to find any tech manager who was not around 60 years old. Peer-to-
peer email from our firm to Japanese engineers was strictly forbidden. Except
for the money involved, it was like a humorous game of Chinese whispers - a
perfectly legitimate technical point raised will come back as completely
illogical gibberish because it was been distorted by layers of management in
between.

Engineers at my (Indian) firm in 2001 were saying that Sony's days are
numbered, and Samsung will eat their lunch. I refused to believe it since
South Korea had just gone through a major crisis. 20 years later, it is
patently clear that they were understating the trend.

The often deserving worship of Japanese culture that many indulge in, leads to
vast blind spots about Japan's cultural disadvantages.

~~~
unabst
Innovation happens at the individual level, and to that end, the Japanese are
incredibly innovative. The person must then fight the hierarchies which farms
the innovations from individuals who are undercompensated for their miraculous
work. Same with the incredible craftsmen and artists. But if the hierarchy is
bad, everyone loses.

The engineer would often then defect and seek a meritocracy where they are
valued by their work and not seniority.

A quick lookup for the Flash inventor backs this. Fujio Masuoka is now CTO of
a company in Singapore.

Shuji Nakamura, the inventory of the blue LED is the other primary example. He
is now professor of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
with 208 US patents and a Nobel prize. He was in the news a lot, and stirred
up much needed debate in Japan regarding who owns the work of an employee.

But one counter example is Nintendo. Shigeru Miyamoto is the genius behind
Super Mario, and him and his small team are responsible for so much of their
hierarchy's success. Nintendo stands tall to this day.

Sony is a mixed bag, but their gaming division is still winning.

Korea is actually known to be incredibly similar to Japan, and according to
one theory the only reason why Korea outpaced Japan is because the Japanese
were too busy addicted to Pachinko. That may sound absurd, but not if you've
seen how ubiquitous Pachinko is, and it's pure gambling with all the dangers
of addiction and lives in shambles. Ironically, 80% of the parlors are owned
by Japanese Koreans.

~~~
hattori31
>Korea outpaced Japan is because the Japanese were too busy addicted to
Pachinko.

Hello from Japan. When people from the Westernized world talk about Japan, I
find it interesting to hear what everyone has to say. Some are true, some are
ridiculous, some are "facts" people echo on forums. This in not true. This is
ridiculous.

Do you think everyone is so addicted that we do nothing else? Do you
understand that the addicted to pachinko is a small percentage and these
people would be addicted to something else and be un-productive anyway?

Its not a matter of "people". Korean companies have outpaced Japanese
companies, because Korean company are more global. And nice for them. But
Pachinko has absolutely nothing to do with that.

~~~
SomeoneFromCA
Pachinko sound like Russian word "pochinka", which means "the process of
repairing something".

------
numpad0
Toshiba’s legendary accounting fraud in PC division:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/zapa/status/1218450189301628928/p...](https://mobile.twitter.com/zapa/status/1218450189301628928/photo/1)

Darker blue is operational profit and lighter blue is sales total in
¥100mil.(~$mil.)

Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can’t make this up and they couldn’t
have been more engineering oriented than this.

~~~
umvi
Can somebody expound a little more on what the fraud was?

Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed
on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1].

From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate
leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet,
with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business
unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of
every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert
back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was
only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the
(already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood
what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock
options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again,
why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way
to hide the oscillations?

My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-
like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation
problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like
(because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient.
They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your
wrath.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scanda...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scandal)

[1]
[https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshi...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshibas-
accounting-scandal-how-it-happened.asp)

~~~
baybal2
Profits > Revenue

~~~
Alupis
Yes, but where can we find a graph and explanation similar to that twitter
post? Google Translate isn't really getting the implications across clearly
for me.

Obviously Profit can't exceed Revenue, but how did they do this?

~~~
numpad0
> It appears there were paper tradings at Toshiba subsidiary “Toshiba IT
> Services” which reminds me the legendary Toshiba accounting fraud. The
> legendary one that the waves compounded from excess manipulation, to the
> point that the operational profit surpassed sales figures.

The tweet I quoted was about a newly discovered incident but the chart is from
2015. Sorry but that was the best link I could find at that time.

In that instance at P.C. sales in 2008-2015, IIRC, the employees were forced
to “do challenges” to meet the predetermined goals by the end of fiscal
year(31st March in Japan). But the target wasn’t realistic and “challenges”
became a synonym for various manipulation inside the corporate, from
relabeling future sales to forging documents. That led to yearly pulse right
at the end of FY and scheduled YoY growth on paper.

------
grawprog
That's too bad. I had toshiba laptop from 2008-2014 or 2015 or so. It was
probably my longest lasting and hardest treated one. That thing carried me all
through school, travelled to yellowstone and all around BC, was taken to camp
sites and used during field work. I regularly threw it in a backpack with no
case or anything packed in with a bunch of stuff and carried it well over a
few hundred km over the years like that.

I'm still not sure exactly what's wrong with it. The original hard drive ended
up with a corrupted MBR, then the replacement drive i put in ended up with the
same thing within a day. I just ended up retiring it and getting a new one.

Though for a while though i was keeping that thing on life support by running
a linux distro partitioned across 4 usb flash drives just so i could keep
using it for a bit longer. I managed to recover everything off the drives that
way too.

By comparison, the acer i replaced it with ended up needing a screen
replacement within 2 years and that thing just pretty much hung out at home.

~~~
keanebean86
I got a ~$250 Toshiba in 2012 for college. I added a small SSD and 4GBs ram so
maybe $350 total. A few years later I replaced the CD drive with a hard drive
since the SSD filled up pretty quick. I still use it daily 8 years later.

My only complaint is the cheap plastic case has deteriorated so it's partially
held together by tape now. I also had to replace the screen hinges a few years
ago.

But compared to the Acer before it (2008 bad Nvidia GPU) and my wife's trash
HP laptop the Toshiba has been worth every penny.

------
oska
My father had a computer store that sold Taiwanese desktop clones and Toshiba
laptops in the late 80s. The article says that Toshiba were manufacturing
laptops from 1985. I'm pretty sure we were selling them in 1987 so I didn't
realise quite how close to the start we were. They were very good laptops at
the time - their only real competitor was the Compaq laptop range and I'd
argue that the Toshibas were better, although I'm obviously biased.

Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200
[2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We
also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a
wondrous thing at the time. It was also _very_ expensive. They were mostly
bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for
personal use too.

It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high,
unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as
well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't
having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay
enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s
arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem
and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I
still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100)

~~~
f00zz
Wasn't there a US import ban on Toshiba products for a few years back in the
80s, apparently because they sold parts to the Soviet Union?

~~~
jzwinck
Part of Toshiba was banned from selling into the US for two years at the end
of the 80's for selling machines to the USSR which were used to make quiet
propellers for submarines.
[https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923](https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923)

This response by the US would have hurt both Japan and the US, while not so
much affecting the USSR who already had their quiet propellers. It probably
did hurt US consumers, but it didn't end up hurting the US government which
ignored its own ban!
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/toshiba-
machine-exporting-to-us-months-after-bans-signing/cdede8cf-
cb12-49c0-a197-4cea3cd9c6a2/)

------
cubix
Their "I checked my notebook" commercials in the 90's are memorable:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI)

No company would even joke about behaving like that on an airplane today.

------
acomjean
Wait. They sold the business to sharp, which renamed it Dynabook. so this
isn't entirely new. (Sharp just recently acquired the remaining 19% of
Toshiba's notebook company it didn't already own.)

~~~
sct202
Sharp is also largely owned by Foxconn, so they probably have some advantages
with production/assembly costs from that.

------
agloeregrets
I had a Toshiba Chromebook for a little while and it was fantastic, a machine
focused around meeting all the hardware needs to be “good enough” at a
reasonable price. It had a great 1080p display, good performance, a good
keyboard and great build. All under $300. Oh well. Such is life.

~~~
bxparks
Agreed, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is nice, 4GB RAM, good keyboard, beautiful
screen. But the web has become so slow and bloated, it's not very usable
anymore. It now works as dedicated recipe terminal in the kitchen. It is still
getting ChromeOS updates, until next year I think.

~~~
digikazi
I still rock a TCB 2 - the earlier version with only 2GB RAM. I still find it
eminently usable and often have 10+ tabs open(1). It hasn't missed a beat
since May 2015 although perhaps recently I've started noticing a bit of
slowness here and there but nothing major. I'm still using it every day as a
bedside laptop; I'll be very sorry to let it go when the time comes.

(1) I use it primarily for light browsing, email and YouTube, so it doesn't do
any heavy lifting.

------
encoderer
Who else was hacking on a Toshiba Satellite in the 90s?

~~~
contingencies
Haha. My first ever non-antique laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro circa 2000.
Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a car.
One of said fellows is apparently now running some major blockchain thought
leader scammery. People don't change their colours.

Prior to that I acquired this guy donated through the local 2600 chapter
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-
psu.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Epson-l3s-and-psu.jpg) and
submitted an nmap fingerprint for its DOS-based, parallel-port driven TCP/IP
stack! Good times.

~~~
canada_dry
> Bought it from some dodgy central Eurasian fellows out of the back of a
> car... people don't change their colours.

And... what dodgy things are _you_ currently involved in?? I'm guessing you
never paid for your RAR license either. /s

~~~
contingencies
One of the oddities of China where I've been for ~20 years is that rar is
still super popular. Never figured that one out. I guess the warez OS images
bundled it years ago and it became a thing for 1.4 billion people. How's that
for a marketing channel?

------
jacquesm
The most impressive laptop I ever owned was a Libretto. It was more than a
decade before another laptop came around that gave that same feeling (the
Macbook Air).

~~~
znpy
Toshiba also had their thin and light (portége z820 iirc) way before slot of
other competitors (the only real competitor was the hp folio 13 iirc).

~~~
jacquesm
Ah, and I forgot to mention the Compaq Aero and the Sony Vaio. I did own the
former, not the latter.

That was the first computer I owned that earned itself back inside of a month.

------
ubermonkey
Toshiba was fucking HUGE in the 1990s. I had a couple back in those days. They
were good machines for the time.

Then IBM became king with the ThinkPad.

~~~
hyperpl
At least personally, I always considered Toshiba laptops to be the bottom of
the barrel in terms of quality. I don't recall a time when thinkpad (at least
before Lenovo bought them) could have been considered inferior?

~~~
chaoticmass
They were quite good in the early to mid 90's but by 2000 and onward they were
pretty bad as far as quality. I worked in a computer store that did also did
repair and there were a few problems you'd always see on Toshibas: power
button failure (ribbon cable on the inside would get damaged or just come
loose) and power connector failures (the barrel connector would come
unsoldered on the inside).

------
dewarrn1
It's a shame because they made such outstanding products at one time. I was
given a Toshiba laptop as I headed off to college in 1995, and it _still
boots_ (to Windows 3.11) 25 years later.

~~~
cabinguy
100%. My first business was buying/refurbishing/selling used laptops. I
bought/sold tens of thousands. Toshiba was by far the best. IBM was 2nd. Now
they’re both gone.

------
bondolo
The only things I liked about my early 2000s Toshiba laptop were the physical
volume control knob and manual wifi switch. Software controlled volume seemed
so stupid in comparison. I still think laptops should have both if these
switches as well as a physical camera and microphone switch. You can't (
realistically) hack past an air gap.

------
jmkb
The Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or
saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like
something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1
hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)

------
maxk42
Real shame. Toshiba always had the best value for low-cost laptops.

------
abhayhegde
There was a time when the Toshiba laptops were the top priority for laptops
and it is strange how the turntables.

------
xioxox
I have a Toshiba Portege R500 in a cupboard somewhere. It was a very
impressive machine. It's extremely light at less than a kg (particularly
compared to others at the time). It has an SSD (albeit on some weird
interface). The keyboard is also rather nice. The most interesting part is the
transflective screen which works in direct sunlight. One nice point was that
Toshiba repaired it free of charge when the screen broken off due to a
korfball incident.

It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
My first ever laptop, and in fact first ever computer that I did not share
with someone else was a Toshiba Satellite A100 that I purchased when I was 22.
I actually needed it for a job I got (not having a computer provided was in
hindsight a bad sign) and the company was so bad I left in 3 months. The
Toshiba was a decent laptop though until 3 years later I switch to a Macbook,
and have had Macbooks since. It seems many other people followed that same
path so sad as it is, it's not a surprise.

------
W-Stool
My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 around 1987. I thought I was quite the
high roller traveling around with that thing. MSDOS and a 640x200 display -
those were the days.

------
ht_th
My first laptop was a Toshiba T3100e from the late 1980s. It still works!

I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and
writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.

------
dasb
I loved my ~2008 Toshiba Satellite. Rest in peace, old friend.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Mine's still in service (as a stationary machine for video comsumption.)

------
knolax
I don't understand the wild leap of logic other comments in this thread are
making where "Company X does fraud" becomes "Japanese work culture leads to
fraud". You could easily make similar shoddy arguments with any country but it
seems HN seems intent on only wheeling out the "tHeIR cUlTuRe Is bAd" argument
when nobody from that culture is around to defend it.

------
aidenn0
First laptop I ever used (or saw for that matter) was a Toshiba T1200. That
thing must have weighed 10lbs, but it was a marvel at the time.

------
blitmap
I really loved the Toshiba Radius 12 I had several years ago, with a 2160p
display. It very much kicked ass at gaming, too.

Toshiba had potential.

------
tomhoward
How the world changes.

I reckon all the laptops I was exposed to in the early-mid 90s through school
and my father’s work were Toshibas, to the point where I may even have thought
Toshiba was the only company that made laptops.

Seeing this news today, my reaction is “Toshiba still makes laptops?”

------
pjmorris
My first work laptop was a Toshiba. We went through so much together that I
nicknamed it R2D2.

~~~
rhizome31
Lol, mine is simply nicknamed "Toto", which here in France is the equivalent
of "foo" and also a naughty child character in jokes.

------
ussrlongbow
I remember Toshiba AC100 back in 2011 (afair) with tegra cpu and 3G modem
weighting about 800 grams. Originally shipped with Android without
marketplace, became more or less usable after installing Ubuntu on it.

They really could win a niche of ultraportable laptops.

------
danans
Almost 2 decades ago my daily driver was a Toshiba Portege running redhat. My
first post college laptop. Despite the effort of required to get it running,
it served me well and had great design for its day.

------
devchix
I had a Toshiba laptop that weighed 80 pounds, a quarter of that was the power
adapter and an external drive. The backpack I carried it in could fit a folded
yurt. It permanently altered my gait. Good times.

------
renewiltord
Funny. The first laptop I saw was my dad's clunky old Portege (from the
'90s?). Tried to bring it back to life the other day but it looks like the
disk is dead and I didn't care _that_ much.

------
spiltketchup
My dad had a Toshiba back in the day and I thought it was the coolest laptop
in existence. I now have had a Macbook for the past 7 years, but I have
nothing bad to say about Toshiba laptops.

------
iancmceachern
The toughbooks were iconic

~~~
joshcain
I thought Toughbooks are made by Panasonic? Did they buy the brand from
Toshiba at some point?

------
benatkin
:(
[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/582967-doge](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/582967-doge)

------
jamil7
My one and only windows pc was a toshiba laptop, the thing overheated so much
that the exhaust grill plastic cracked and broke off leaving a side of the
laptop exposed.

------
jfb
I always lusted after a T3100. God, that was an amazing machine.

------
rmason
I had several generations of Qosmio laptops and they were exceptionally good
high performance machines. A bit pricey but for the use I gave them a great
value.

------
baybal2
SO, even the Japanese now prefer less boring styled laptops?

~~~
innocenat
Panasonic still make Let's Note, so I guess not.

~~~
baybal2
Let's Note 10 incher is by far not boring, or cheap styled. It's a status
product in Japan. Almost like Iphone, but 1 decade before it.

------
knifepatrol
My first laptop was a Toshiba around 2003. It was pretty great at the time,
but laughably heavy and clunky by today’s standards (I still have it for some
reason...)

RIP

------
_emacsomancer_
I still have an old ca. 2008 Toshiba Satellite laptop running as a sort of
media centre for the exercise room. My first laptop.

------
sparrish
My first laptop was a Toshiba 205CDS. Loved it. Bought Toshiba for years until
I finally saw the light and moved to Thinkpads.

~~~
thisisnico
best deal is to buy pre-owned think pads for 1/4th the msrp.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Or well below. I bought a T41 on eBay for $150 around 2009 and it finally bit
the dust last year.

------
metah
End of an era, I guess. My first ever computer was a Toshiba T1910 in the mid
90s. Monochrome, Running windows 3.1.

------
goatinaboat
I think I still might have my old Toshiba laptop somewhere. Installed Debian
on it via ZMODEM. Good times.

------
zumu
Not that with Toshiba it was necessarily the case, but are there any Made in
Japan laptops left on the market?

~~~
Marsymars
I think Vaio, Fujitsu, Panasonic.

~~~
reaperducer
But are they actually made in Japan, or are they just Japanese companies that
farm the manufacturing out to China, like everyone else?

The last time I was in Yodobashi Camera, I had a hard time finding _any_
electronics that were actually made in Japan. I even asked the staff about it.

~~~
fomine3
NEC and Fujitsu was famost PC manufacturer in Japan but they are acquired by
Lenovo (partially). But they are still building some PCs (mainly Laptop) in
Japan and selling. I don't know whether they are exported. Some ThinkPads are
also made on NEC fabs in Japan.

------
theklub
Toshiba protege m400 tablets were a god damn nightmare and forever tarnished
the brand for me.

------
ilyas121
Wild, I remember when I lived in Morocco, Toshiba laptops were all that I saw.

------
stretchwithme
We had a Trashiba system 20 years ago. The case was impossible to open.

------
wildpeaks
End of an era, their laptops used to be everywhere.

------
moneywoes
Reminds me of When sony quit

