Lenovo Story in the Magazine

I have a major feature in Portfolio and on Portfolio.com, about how China hopes Lenovo will become that nation's Sony or Samsung.

Lenovo -- which is half the Chinese computer maker once known as Legend and half IBM's old PC division -- is a fascinating sidebar to the historic IBM story. That's a big reason I enjoyed writing about it. I've written about IBM since working as a business reporter at the Binghamton, N.Y., Evening Press in the mid-1980s. IBM grew up in the Binghamton area. Eventually, I wrote a book about Thomas Watson Sr., who built IBM. A few years ago, I wrote about the merger of Lenovo and IBM's PC unit for Wired.

Now executives trained at IBM, led by a new CEO from Dell, are trying to make a Chinese computer company into a world-class corporation that can stand with Sony or Nokia or Dell. The world is an amazingly different place than in Watson's day.

(Lenovo's Coca-Cola-themed laptop.)

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