Cyberespionage? Cyberslueths disclose Lenovo’s 2010 ‘roadmap’

Posted Feb. 3, 2010 at 7:48 a.m.

Cyberespionage? Cyberslueths disclose Lenovo’s 2010 ‘roadmap’

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Note: The Skinny blog is written by Rick Smith, editor and co-founder of Local Tech Wire and business editor of WRAL.com.

MORRISVILLE, N.C. – Whether this was corporate espionage or a leak, Lenovo’s “roadmap” development and product rollout plans for 2010 are a global non-secret today.

The Web site Engadget somehow secured a photo of Lenovo’s wall chart for this year and published it. Other Web sites followed as well, gleefully speculating about what the information seems to indicate.

Publishing of the chart came just hours ahead of the latest earnings announcement coming from the world’s No. 4 PC maker.

The roadmap disclosure also overshadowed some other interesting news for Lenovo. According to one executive, the company, which is based in Morrisville but maintains most of its operations in China, is reviewing its strategy in the tough-as-nails server market.

Back to the roadmap.

“Our crack team over at Engadget Chinese has managed to snag the above roadmap slide for Lenovo's mobile computer division,” Engadget bradded. “We've seen earlier versions of the same slide - when the Edge and T410 / T510 [models] were freshly added -- but the very latest iteration contains a sprinkling of even newer machines.”

Lenovo unleashed a wave of new machines at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in las Vegas, and the mobile market is by far the world’s hottest.

Will Lenovo’s roadmap disclosure give aid and comfort to its rivals as they plot their own strategies?

According to Engadget, the slide shows “most intriguing” plans for two new series of machines targeting corporate series called the L400 and L500.

Meanwhile, the Digital Trends site says the Lenovo roadmap slide “included several previously-unseen models like the X201 tablet and X201/X201s ultraportables, the W701 performance workstation, and the L400 and L500 mainstream notebooks. This slide doesn’t give us any real details—mostly just mini silhouetted icons of laptops and tablets—but just knowing they’re coming out this year is good enough for us.”

Is the Server Group in Trouble?

“Lenovo is reviewing its server business after admitting that the current volumes generated by the unit have not been high enough,” the U.K. Web site MicroScope reported Tuesday.

"At this particular point in time we are in a bit of a hole regarding servers," Milko Van Duijl, president of Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, said, according to the report.

"We are evaluating what we are going to do with it, clearly if we don't sell hundreds of thousands of units it doesn't add much to the business so there is a lot of work [ahead]," he added.

Lenovo sold some 64,000 “ThnkServers” through the third quarter of 2009 after launching them in the last three months of 2008, the site said, citing data from IDC. That sales figure put Lenovo in eighth place in market share.

Mobile Deal Closes

In other news, Lenovo said it had formally closed on the $200 million reacquisition of its Lenovo Mobile Communications Technology group. Lenovo is planning to reenter the mobile phone market, starting in China, with a smartphone called the “LePhone.”

Lenovo had spun off the mobile group to investors including Hony Capital then announced the reacquisition last November.

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Tags: Lenovo, PC industry

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