Refurb IBM on Ebay

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 19 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

9 Jul 2003

My ThinkPad A20m is a great laptop, but the screen is starting to go. I get strange pink spots on portions of the screen now and then, and yesterday the screen started to flicker on and off. So it’s time to start thinking about a new laptop. This is my third ThinkPad, and I’m insanely happy with them, so unless I switch to a PowerBook, I’ll probably buy another ThinkPad.

I popped over to Ebay to see what sort of deals were available there, and I discovered that IBM leasing sells on Ebay. They have returned and refurbished laptops desktops and servers for sale at pretty decent prices. You can save several hundred buy buying this way, and most of the laptops seem to have larger hard drives and more RAM than is normally included with new ThinkPads.

It’s a smart example of a company using alternate sales channels to reduce inventory, increase profits. They are taking advantage of their brand and sales expertise to move the products. The auction listings are beautifuly designed and have significantly more information in them than the average Ebay listing. As a result, the prices they are getting are slightly higher than similar Ebay items.

Recently Written

The Trap of The Sales-Led Product (Dec 10): It’s not a winning way to build a product company.
The Hidden Cost of Custom Customer Features (Dec 7): One-off features will cost you more than you think and make your customers unhappy.
Domain expertise in Product Management (Nov 16): When you're hiring software product managers, hire for product management skills. Looking for domain experts will reduce the pool of people you can hire and might just be worse for your product.
Strategy Means Saying No (Oct 27): An oft-overlooked aspect of strategy is to define what you are not doing. There are lots of adjacent problems you can attack. Strategy means defining which ones you will ignore.
Understanding vision, strategy, and execution (Oct 24): Vision is what you're trying to do. Strategy is broad strokes on how you'll get there. Execution is the tasks you complete to complete the strategy.
How to advance your Product Market Fit KPI (Oct 21): Finding the gaps in your product that will unlock the next round of growth.
Developer Relations as Developer Success (Oct 19): Outreach, marketing, and developer evangelism are a part of Developer Relations. But the companies that are most successful with developers spend most of their time on something else.
Developer Experience Principle 6: Easy to Maintain (Oct 17): Keeping your product Easy to Maintain will improve the lives of your team and your customers. It will help keep your docs up to date. Your SDKs and APIs will be released in sync. Your tooling and overall experience will shine.