] ...an even better and more audacious speculation is that
] once publicly free of the PC division IBM will either
] buy, or form a close joint venture with Apple to sell its
] PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's
] PowerPC chip.

This consolidation would fascinating, but I'm not sure I see it. If we accept that IBM has caught the Open Source Bug, buying a company that makes money on software -- and who is working on eliminating need for support at all (IBM's bread-and-butter) (see old memeage about the new iMacs being fully user servicable)... doesn't make much sense.

But... maybe. Maybe Apple would sell its computing division to IBM and fully become an iPod/media company. Maybe they'd inherit enough design-crazed staff to keep up the sexy-hardware lifestyle branding. Maybe.

And that would be the gleeful cackling of the Gartner analyst, over the reduction to 8 of 10 major players in a single well-timed move, that you hear in the background