Ambra Computer Corporation

~ the obit ~

By 1991 IBM was losing the personal computer market it had created to companies selling nearly identical machines for much less money. The response, worked out by nine IBM staff from November of that year, was to build a clone maker of its own and keep IBM's name off it. The vehicle was Individual Computer Products International Ltd, a dormant wholly owned subsidiary of IBM UK, and the brand it launched on 4 June 1992 was called Ambra.

It sold by mail order and television advertising under the slogan "Take your mind for a run", first in Britain and then across France and ten more European countries, with a separate licensee company taking it into the United States from 1993. The machines were ordinary. They were 386SX and 486SX boxes assembled down to a price, built under contract in Singapore at first and later at IBM's own plant in Greenock. The point was never the hardware. IBM said at the time that Ambra was a cheap way to try out mass-marketing techniques, which is a polite description of running an experiment on your own competitors.

It lasted less than two years. On 16 February 1994 IBM announced it was withdrawing the European line, and Computergram reported the detail the next day: the withdrawal would take effect on 31 March, ICPI "becomes dormant again", and the reason was that price cuts on IBM's own ValuePoint and ThinkPad ranges had left the Ambras "no longer competitive". The European operation had taken about 1% of the continent's low-end clone segment. The US subsidiary went that July, under a New York Times headline dated 29 July 1994: I.B.M. to Close Ambra Personal Computer Subsidiary.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sixty-four people, four of them employees ~

The arm's-length structure shows up most clearly in the headcount. Computergram reported that the whole European Ambra operation consisted of around 64 people, of whom 60 were contractual and only four were actual IBM staff. When it closed, the four IBMers went back inside IBM and the other sixty were offered redundancy terms. One of the largest corporations in the world had run a consumer PC brand across eleven countries with four of its own people on the payroll. Whether that was discipline or deniability depends on which IBM executive you ask.

Those terms also explain why Ambra left so little trace. There was no Ambra building and no Ambra engineering culture to inherit. When the brand went dormant, nothing was left holding the shape of it.

~ what replaced it ~

IBM dropped the pretense and competed under its own name instead. The Aptiva line, launched in September 1994, was IBM's consumer desktop for the rest of the decade and it did the job Ambra had been invented to do, with the logo on the front. Wikipedia adds that the Ambra line carried on in Canada until 1996, which is the only support for the 1996 end date that English Wikipedia files the company under. No independent source confirms it.

One caution for anyone citing this grave. The inside account of Ambra's creation, including the nine-person start and the 4 June 1992 launch date, comes from a Wikipedia article that carries a conflict-of-interest tag, and the manufacturing arrangements rest on trade-press fragments. The corroboration for the launch is thin: Computergram reported on 25 May 1992 that ICPI was about to introduce three machines. Everything in this grave about the closure, by contrast, is contemporaneous trade reporting.

~ the distance ~

I was eight when Ambra launched and ten when IBM withdrew it, and I did not get online until 1998 on a 14.4k modem. Turkish homes of the early 1990s were not a mail-order PC market, and the machines that mattered in Turkey arrived through importers and the gray market rather than through a television advertisement with a phone number at the bottom. What reached me instead was the tail end of the same price war: by the time I was building anything, a PC was a pile of components from a shop in Ankara with no brand on it at all, which is more or less what Ambra had been pretending to be.

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