I wanted to immediately shout, "now THIS is something SJ would be rolling in his grave over." However, in the mid 2000s he was a big believer in switching to Intel and even though I found it hard to believe a company that pushed PowerPC for so long was suddenly so willing to join "the dark side" at the time.
His Intel switch bet played off for Apple and I imagine this bet by Tim Cook will also play out for them. I look forward to having many more years of iOS work and many more years of Xcode and iOS SDK improvements :-). Stability and security will be at the top of the lists :-D
> Thanks to HP's distribution network, the iPod+HP was sold in retailers where Apple did not have any presence at the time, which included Wal-Mart, RadioShack, and Office Depot. Many of these retailers now sell Apple iPods.
In hindsight, the subsequent sales explosion makes it look unnecessary [2]
"In 1989, IBM signed a deal with NeXT to license NeXTstep to run on Big Blue's RISC chip. But Jobs now says that while a long-term relationship with IBM will move forward, "it's no secret that the project to put NeXT software on the IBM RS/6000 has broken down."
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple his laptop of choice was an IBM Thinkpad (560E). In fact, "he delivered it to Apple’s designers as a model of where the PowerBook line needed to go."
I don't mean to be so dismissive but you kidding me right?
IBM and Microsoft signed an contract, that IBM AT clone computers would ship with Microsoft DOS and they would license (and pay for) every-single-copy of it. The openish IBM PC standard allowed for Microsoft to continually expand into their near monopoly on the Business, and Home PC market.
That agreement literally built Microsoft. When they signed that agreement, Microsoft didn't even own the rights to DOS, or had even made an OS. They just licensed a BASIC compiler.
DOS and Windows are not the same thing. One reasonable interpretation of the history is that "Windows" is specifically the point over which Microsoft & IBM diverged, with Windows being the additions/lineage where Microsoft ruled and IBM's formal contributions essentially nil.
At the time, Windows was a GUI shell over DOS. The diverging happened when IBM and Microsoft were working on OS/2, and Microsoft decided to split and develop WinNT.
In DOS you literally started windows as an application (not MSDOS 1.0). Windows was originally a visual file manager in MSDOS long before it was short hand for an OS/and full window manager we know today.
Yes, but what was IBM's formal involvement in any of those early versions of 'Windows'?
Neither my memory nor the Wikipedia history suggest any formal IBM role in the development of 'Windows' itself, at least not through Windows 3.11. It wasn't a joint project (though I suppose the closeness of the partnership likely meant source/fix/feature sharing behind the scenes).
Then, IBM was formally cooperating with Microsoft on something they thought would be OS/2. To the extent anything co-developed then wound up in Windows NT, that was never IBM's intent. Again, Windows was the Microsoft-controlled branch, not the partnership product.
That would roughly match the assertion by rational-future about which you were dismissive.
If you look at the way schools are buying tablets. It's pretty spot on. They could go for a cheaper Android tablets but most of them are junk or 1 step above junk.
I don't know if that's "funny" (curious I'd say) or not. It seems that Apple's push is towards iOS and more away from OS X. More and more it seems that iOS features are making their way into OS X and not the other way around. Maybe once you can easily develop apps for iOS on your iDevice you might see the death knell of OS X and bigger hardware. Just speculation on my part ;)
I had that gut feeling prior to the stuff released in WWDC this year. If anything they're going for a complete customer experience across their iOS and OS X devices. OS X apps will get storyboards which was an iOS only thing in Xcode.
It really feels like they're going back over a lot of APIs in OS X and giving them a makeover with the lessons learned from iOS. Where Microsoft may have given developers a single API, Apple gives different APIs that have parity. (Plenty of the new APIs seem to work on both 10.10 and iOS 8)
Right, because Windows is entrenched. There is little hope for OSX to displace Windows. Look at how Sun & Linux initiatives tried and largely failed.
This is for iOS a greenfield space, where Apple wants to lock up their position as the standard mobile platform. Apple can win without working too hard to displace the incumbent (likely Blackberry).
I think Watson's role will be more geared towards the HealthKit side of things for Apple, since that's already what IBM are putting the technology towards.
They're talking about Google here but this is more of a claim against Microsoft's territory. It looks like a play to replace Active Directory and Exchange Server with device-integrated cloud services.
private cloud services. buy the big iron from IBM, everybody's phones sync to private app stores and private backup systems. Seems like a pretty swell idea, especially when you have legal security obligations like HIPAA or whatever.
This smells of desperation for IBM - it seems to be risk free for Apple. IBM sells their expensive mainframes/server, expensive consultants, and oh by the way, you have to buy 300 iPads as well as part of the contract.
It will be interesting to see how this works out. The one thing Apple lacks is the monster enterprise salesforce that IBM has. And that may be the strongest thing that IBM has left.
For the three months ended 29 March, Apple had $10.223B in net income. For roughly the same quarter (ending 31 March), IBM had $2.384B.
Apple is carrying $18.949B in cash and cash equivalents (though most of this is locked-up overseas), and another $22.401B in short-term marketable securities.
IBM is carrying $9.409B in cash and cash equivalents, and a mere $295M in markable securities.
Funny. I just started @ IBM. Can't run Windows because I have privileged access to systems. Can't BYOD because same. Can't hackintosh because licensing. And officially they don't buy Macs.
Some weird IBM flavor of RHEL 6.5 is what they gave me. On hardware that is near top-of-the-line and thus poorly supported. I bought a docking station and it was an ordeal just to get it to recognize a monitor attached to the dock. And it crashes on undocking.
But the kicker is that my job here revolves around VMware and Windows. VMware's web client needs a newer version of Flash than you can get on Linux outside of Chrome. And Chrome dropped RHEL 6.x ages ago. And every RDP app packed with RHEL 6.x is junk compared to CoRD or RDCMan.
If I could BYOD I'd happily go buy a new MBA and IBM could toss it into a Blendtec when I'm done here.
> On hardware that is near top-of-the-line and thus poorly supported.
Haha, there's got to be a name for that paradox: you want to run Linux on your brand new computer, but the hardware isn't well supported.
Do you:
a) Settle for a Linux install that sometimes does weird things (on my Lenovo Yoga 2, I have to close the laptop lid and re-open it to get the computer to come back from suspend properly).
b) Settle for Windows 8?
Unless you've got the time to write your own device drivers, the MBA is the most "rational" choice for a new laptop. (IBM pun not intended.)
There's always an exception somewhere. At a previous job the IT department wouldn't buy Macs for anyone. Except themselves. They took a little too much joy in swapping my Mac for a Dell when I left IT...
This is Apple making an attack at Google. Microsoft is a gonner in a few years. Google was ready to take charge of their market with Google apps and cloud services.
Apple is gonna make IBM build a cloud base infrastructure with Apple User interface and QA. We are talking very high end costumers, not the typical small or medium corp. No one will be fired for buying Apple and IBM. Google, maybe.
Enterprise Cloud was one Horse race for Microsoft market. Now there are two.
A bit more than a few years. They still have pretty good profits (Windows and Office are still quite popular,) and even if that dried up suddenly and they had zero revenue, they could quite literally live on their cash reserves for a decade.
If Microsoft goes to zero revenue, their shareholders will have different uses for the cash. Long before that point it will be dismantled.
[edit: downvotes, seriously? I'm just pointing out that Microsoft is not a private company that can do whatever it likes with its cash pile if it is not performing. I guess that is uncomfortable for some reason.]
IBM was already going head to head with Microsoft. Has been for about twenty years. Their quality was already enterprise grade, it's Apple that is trying to make a critical transition - out of the cyclic commodity consumer hardware business and into the more stable B2B markets.
The problem for Apple is their secrecy and planned three year obsolescence is unattractive at scale for large businesses. A large part of IBM's continued relevance has been from their shift toward solutions leveraging open source as well as providing customers with clear roadmaps.
Do you really believe that Google was ready to take charge of the market? Many people have a Gmail account and a YouTube account, but do you see many people using their Docs offering instead of Microsoft Office?
Without trying to sound too harsh, the problem with Google is that they have a faddish focus, and don't appear to maintain some product offerings once they are past the "look! It's NEW!" phase. If you made the recommendation to switch to Google's systems, would your manager be asking "How long is it going to be there for?". It's a pity. Do you see "enterprise" switching to systems like that? Do you see loads of Chromebooks and Chromeboxes (do they even still make them?) on desks instead of PCs? Honestly?
This is different to Microsoft's strategy where you can still run software from 20 years ago, and some businesses like only investing in software once, instead of an ongoing licensing fee. I do not see Microsoft disappearing quickly, despite how popular web apps are in startup circles; Windows still rules the enterprise desktop.
I myself write software on a Mac but everybody else here has never used a Mac and are flummoxed if presented with its desktop, and typically see Apple products are overpriced.
High end customers would involve large corporations where there would be a need for many PCs traditionally. Although iPads have become popular with BYOD, do most people just accept that it's a great consumer (consuming) device and not marvellous for creation of content? If large corporations were to switch their desktops to Apple machines, do you think the profit margin would increase or decrease?
IBM makes some of the worst front end software in the world. Lotus Notes, Rational Rose, Doors etc. Deeply nested menus, one level of undo, zero to negative OS integration, bugs that never get fixed, unsearchable documentation, bloat upon bloat, everything that gives enterprise software a bad name.
I wonder whether Apple will bring IBM up or will IBM bring Apple down on that front.
No, no it really wasn't. It had some well-earned respect, and was innovative. It offered power to the users that was unheard of in those days, allowing them to spin out their own discussions and applications without needing software developers to help out. It clustered, it scaled, it had granular levels of security that still hold up today. It was used to build online communities in the days when dial-up BBSes were the norm.
While the UI of its client sucked compared to anything we see today, those were the days of Windows 3.1. Everything sucked back then.
It has aged poorly. But it had its place, and its time.
I used Informix 11 inside Cisco CM and it seemed alright, although their syntax for returning data from stored procedures seemed odd (they returned data by shoving it into variables and then calling return multiple times in a loop instead of just returning a "set" data type) but that could be my unfamiliarity with it.
Those SPs were pretty massive too, hundreds and hundreds of lines long, calling other hundred lines SPs.
Is branding driving the bus when what counts as innovation for Apple in 2014 is the iBMPhone? The only way this makes sense is if Apple is planning to purchase IBM because otherwise they are the weaker party in a partnership - phones and tablets and pc's are commodities, big iron boxes and enterprise expertise are not.
Yeah, but have you seen the "race to the bottom" manufacturers offering their own brand cornflakes? It's certainly driving those big supermarkets out of business! Tesco Value Cornflakes? It's wrecking them!
(Only kidding; the market is large enough that different devices can cater for different needs and price ranges. There appears to be a trend to see something new in this industry and proclaim the demise of other businesses due to them not making this new product or offering this new service. It's short-sighted.)
phones and tablets and pc's are commodities, big iron boxes and enterprise expertise are not.
My impression is the opposite; there's only one iPhone. The whole BYOD thing happened because if you gave employees Blackberries they'd still go out and buy iPhones.
Blackberry is not the iPhone's competition today and it is unlikely to be the iPhone's competition in the future. Today it's the Galaxy etc. and they are really nice phones with really good apps and perhaps even more importantly in the enterprise world, a diversity of open source development stacks that align well with the rest of the enterprise development eco-system.
You are right that Blackberry doesn't compete with Apple in the consumer space. But, a lot of enterprise shops are still Blackberry. Largely because Blackberry infrastructure has been in place for years and purchasing takes a long time as well. Apple with IBM has a chance to displace those aging Blackberry mail gateways.
The iPhone doesn't change IBM 's opportunity because we're not talking about replacing one device specific infrastructure with a different device specific infrastructure. The BlackBerry specific systems IBM would replace are likely to be replaced with device agnostic not iPhone specific in most cases.
The only meaningful differences for IBM I see are that it can throw a bunch of iPhones into the deal and bundle them under the service contract with Apple's blessings and that IBM can use iPhones in literature and dog and pony shows.
IBM does not want Microsoft to be successful in this space. A homogeneous Microsoft environment is bad for IBM. You are right that IBM won't make a lot of money through Apple, maybe incremental services & support revenue, but it also helps to protect IBM from Microsoft software in the enterprise.
This seems like a very smart move for both parties and is going to massively disruptive effect on the industry. It'll be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft react (especially since Microsoft seems to be finally dragging itself out of the Ballmer dark age).
It's a perfect synergy[1], with IBM having dropped hardware some time ago and subsequently, most software, in favour of open-source + prestige R&D + consultancy services. Apple on the other hand, makes some of the best hardware around and turns a good profit doing it, and they also have some of the best software UX (if not necessarily the most powerful solutions). Put the two together and it's an extremely potent combination, as long as they can pull off the collaboration effectively. Apple is already making fairly serious inroads into corporate IT since BYOD became a thing. To a lesser extent, they've been a business brand longer than they've been perceived as purely consumer-oriented, with the design industry being the only thing that kept them alive in the 90s pre-iPod-turnaround.
It will also be interesting to see what impact this has on open source, because that's something that IBM currently supports heavily so they can avoid the cost of developing a lot of common business software in-house. This partnership might herald a preference for, for example, Apple servers running OSX, over Linux.
A more positive outcome is that we're likely to see significant improvements in Apple software to meet needs that IBM clients will demand: stuff that tends to sit on a dusty shelf for years, like fixing SMB support in OSX, might start seeing some serious engineering investment by Apple.
We also might see an end to Apple's "no rollbacks" policy, which IMO is a serious barrier to adoption in corporate environments (and is a huge pain for testing). No IT department worth its salt will ever push out a possibly breaking change like an OS update without a rollback plan, but Apple actively prevents that right now. Either that, or Apple will need to up it's release cycles to match the way SaaS is typically managed and take bug reports more seriously, although probably only when they come through a priority channel reserved for corporate customers, much like how Microsoft handles "unofficial" hotfixes that don't go into Windows update.
[1] Apologies for using the word "synergy" but it really is appropriate here.
And at the pinnacle of the "perfect synergy" will be the C-levels and execs saying "This <industry specific iOS app> is awesome for my world wide safesforce! Now how do I export all the data to Excel?"
This initiative probably has the MS Office 365 marketing people salivating.
It's quite easy to export moderately sized data sets to xlsx.
The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with).
Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.
Not quite. Macros are probably the biggest thing that's missing, but there are others.
Some documents that I've prepared in Excel with complex (meaning not all that complex) don't come into Numbers properly (a stacked bar with one series as a line, for example).
I'm a daily users of Numbers and I can say unequivocally it is not quite close enough. They get 90-95% percent of it right. It's that last 5% that always give me headaches when I export an xlsx.
It's not just the macros but 100s of little things that break compatibility.
If you use Numbers with Excel for anything but the most basic spreadsheet list you are going to have a bad time.
Transition from Excel to "something else" merely has to be not much worse than transition from Excel 20?? to Excel 20??. Or even if it is worse, be worth the pain.
Its something of a stereotype but generally Excel to "something else" is less painful than old Excel to new Excel.
Your post all seems to be very consumerist. IBM sells servers. Apple does not sell servers. IBM sells their own server hardware. IBM dropped their x64/x86 servers recently.
Apple makes consumer hardware, IBM makes expensively marked up enterprise hardware.
IBM makes TERRIBLE software, apple makes shiny consumer stuff, the absolute most that will come out of this is sametime and or notes getting a small bit more attention from IBM on iOS products. Most of IBM's crap is a thinly veiled customisation on top of Eclipse, it makes me laugh thinking about how that will translate to an iOS device. IBM's server side software, while marginally better - what apple hardware is that going to run on?
IBM clients couldn't give less of a hoot about samba shares in OSX. This news will have approximately zero effect.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the recent cringely book on IBM, which I learned about from HN.
IBM doesn't even make their own servers anymore - selling that business to lenovo (IBM only makes mainframes).
I assume this is relatively neutral for both parties, and reflects the deterioration of technical competence at IBM.
IBM will act as a giant sales arm, and apple would fulfill whatever contract IBM can land. only question is how big the scale they can accomplish together. you would think IBM enterprise is naturally large scale but not necessarily justifying largest-market-cap-in-the-world. apple's still going to need major consumer hits to keep growing.
Apple has $574bn market cap last check, to IBMs $190bn. Apple would almost need to acquire IBM to move the needle, and selfishly, as an apple-convert, i hope they aren't actually considering that.
would be a true shame for apple to stop building the consumer products of our dreams, to build some soul-less bullshit for "enterprise" courtesy of IBM. risk of the great dream dying.
also big risk of the IBM culture and mindset infecting apple.
i'm sure steve jobs would get a huge kick out of apple throwing a lifeline to IBM, thinking back to the 80s when IBM was "big blue" and a formidable technology competitor.
i could see steve going ahead with this for kicks, which is about how i think apple is going to approach it. can't harm apple if they ring-fence the work, and don't let IBM management practices become apple practices.
What is Apple's next big push? Wearable (motion processor in iPhone, iWatch) sensor monitoring of humans for medical, insurance and payments (iBeacon/BT), among other use cases for lifeform surveillance.
Can Apple support the cloud analytics needed to process the large amount of human-generated, personal sensor data for the many enterprise verticals that will be transformed by this data?
IBM has invested in "Smart City" initiatives, urban-scale control and coordination. Pick your favorite sci-fi movie. There is potential here to marry the personal operating system (Apple) and the city-state operating system (IBM).
Earlier this year, IBM adopted an ARM-like approach to their Power architecture, licensing IP to "OpenPower" partners. For example, here's a $4.88 billion joint project on servers & software for smart cities in China.
The joint project with Chinese firm Sichuan Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies Co. Ltd follows their announcement on May 18 that they will build a service center dedicated to the big data and cloud computing that is necessary for smart cities.
... "Cooperation with IBM will have an immense impact on the construction of smart cities in the world and fast-track the R&D level of high-end servers in China by 10 to 20 years," said He Wenjun, chairman of Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies.
The smart city concept was invented by IBM.
In 2012, China selected over 130 cities as pilot sites for a smart city program that will explore ways to foster a new type of urbanization.
>Can Apple support the cloud analytics needed to process the large amount of human-generated, personal sensor data for the many enterprise verticals that will be transformed by this data?
No. Which is why they are looking to IBM to condense this "big data" on the server side and stream it to the iOS devices.
> IBM will act as a giant sales arm, and apple would fulfill whatever contract IBM can land
It is OK to think that way re hardware. But it is backwards re software. IBM sold off almost all their hardware divisions (laptops, printers, storage) because they make their money on services. IBM is basically a consultancy nowadays. IBM is doing what they do here: selling software consulting services and solutions that run on Apple. Apple isn't going to do any development work for this at all.
I'm developing for and using IBM Notes and I mostly agree with your post, even though it's a bit exaggerated here and there. IBM is a very top heavy organisation and this shows up a lot in their software - they follow lots of fads cough Notes social edition cough and add fancy new themes on top of everything while not improving the basic product since the mid 90ies.
Lately I've been heavily involved in a project[1] that tries to improve this situation - sort of a next generation Notes based on CouchDB, with fully relational data models, extremely fast development cycles and upcoming mobile+offline clients. Mid-term we want to offer interfaces to Notes/Domino, such that migration becomes a matter of hours per application. I'm curious to see, how IBM wants to solve the inability of Notes to be fully integrated onto iOS - their announcement didn't even mention it, it rather seems like they want to sell you expensive consulting months to create each application from the ground up using their cloud platforms. Cost-wise this will be multiple orders of magnitude off of what we're trying to offer.
This deal is just a press release. I imagine that an enterprise willing to pay up for Apple hardware, is not the kind of enterprise to settle for vendor-lock in mediocrity in software, while the PHB's buying enterprise class mediocrity from IBM will not pay up for Apple hardware.
There should be a Design Group per product, that you are on rotation split across everything is typical of IBM, and it shows, although the current approach at least leads to consistent results.
I wonder how many reports Jony Ive has to him compared to his equivalent number in IBM.
While I defend "disruption" as a thing, that happens sometimes, I don't think this is it.
What Apple and IBM have really done is join an ongoing movement, something that has been going on for years. People already have these iPhones in their pockets, these iPads on their desks, and they very naturally have been integrating them with their life-and-business processes.
Sure, Google would love to have the IOS cache, but this deal more reinforces IOS market dominance than "disrupts" it, the leader.
I don't mean that this move in itself will be disruptive in that sense, but rather that it is going to force the rest of the market (including the current leaders, especially Microsoft) to do disruptive things to compete.
Yes, it's the "ongoing movement" to mobile that is disruptive. This agreement is just part of it.
It's not even a technical change for Apple... the same devices, used in the same way (I think they'd fail brand-damaging if they tried to suddenly be "enterprise", you need "dirt under your fingernails" as Cook said).
However... the imprimatur of IBM will open the floodgates for all those enterprise VP waiting for a sign that it's time to switch. (Just as the IBM PC did for personal computers?). Suddenly, the herd of VPs will place orders, each massive in their own right, overwhelming even Apple. That's the budget that previously was allocated to desktops/laptops...
So, in a market sense, this is arguably the key to the disruption. And looking back, the moment the dam breaks might well be seen as the disruption (rather than the warning drips and trickles). Certainly the most consequential.
Sorry, but this all depends on an assumption I question: "normal people don't really need desktops".
It shows up over and over again, but its a failure of reasoning: on average no one uses any specialized software on a desktop, just a web browser and spreadsheet. But the average is not a real person to start with. All the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bits of custom code people use to do their jobs do not easily translate to locked down mobile environments. Heck, ask anyone using Excel for a lot of work: there's more VBA out there that's utterly vital then anyone would care to admit.
If Apple aren't breaking into enterprise with Macs, they're not going to somehow manage it with iOS except in the same space they always have.
Agreed Apple won't win the Enterpise. But IBM already has.
Agreed tablets won't replace desktop completely - just as desktops didn't replace mainframes completely.
I imagine a normal distribution, over how much PC functionality is needed, by how many people. On the left, people who hardly need a PC - they've already switched to mobiles. Then the middle, the average, where they need a spreadsheet/word processor (to varying degrees). Finally, on the right, tapering off into specialized domain software (including your VB scripts), CAD/CAM, simulation, desktop publishing, animation, visualization etc. This is the long tail you mean, where each person requires a different subset of functionality.
There'll be a process of adoption, step-by-step, left-to-right, which eventually will get stopped (perhaps at spreadsheets?). The question is whether IBM can create apps that really do meet their customer needs well enough to displace desktops. There are many roles where they can.
And if we look at degrees of usage, perhaps if some role only needs occasional spreadsheet access, they might have one PC in the office (instead of one on each desk). Or, rearrange job roles so specialist does that. Or, perhaps google spreadsheets are "good enough" for their use. Or maybe some specialised app, with their exact subset of functionality will rise to the fore - that will actually be better for their specific use, because customized to it...
today, software is far cheaper to build than when spreadsheets became standardized and ubiquitous.
One last data point: it could be that iPads become desktops. Add a keyboard and mouse and a stand... This isn't disruptive of the usage, just of the supplier!
The data point is that that's how I use my phone, with a bluetooth keyboard. I'm using it now. I do most of my programming and ssh on my phone now. It is awkward in some ways (mainly, the bt keyboard sucks), but mostly is more convenient than my desktop.
So maybe this isn't really "opening the floodgates" as I first said, just the beginning of a trickle, as IBM starts to displace desktop usage in the enterprise, role by role.
How exactly iOS is the leader? Do you mean mindshare or marketshare? Perhaps among developers? Or US middle-class?
Besides this being just a traditional PR move by both companies (Apple doesn't have traction in the enterprise market, except for CEOs wanting the IT dept to support their iPhones -- and IBM doesn't have traction in the consumer market, nothing could be more boring than IBM products), this is two companies with cultures on opposite extreme sides of the spectrum.
I personally (redundantly) am an android/linux user, but I perceive that iPhone and iPad are accepted in rich and powerful circles, and are precisely the market for an IBM effort.
I don't think IBM wants to sell _both_ a corporate data initiative and a new phone at the same time.
There are a lot of places that cannot or will not, and might never support, BYOD.
In those areas, and many other corporate enterprise areas, Apple is on is already on its way out, specifically because they never really integrated or put any special effort on integrating with the existing corporate infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has used this time that Apple squandered to finally catch up for the most part.
A lot of large corporations gave Apple a chance 5 years ago and nothing ever really came of it. They will not be getting another chance any time soon.
The whole point (in the short term at least) of teaming up with IBM is to sell iOS devices by the hundreds or thousands to enterprise clients that might otherwise not accept BYOD.
Apple has already been doing a lot of work over the last couple of years geared towards making iOS more acceptable to enterprise and we're clearly going to see even more progress in that direction.
Say what you will about the quality of IBM's software and services, IBM probably understands enterprise-scale IT better than anyone else. A lot of that knowledge is now going to be transferred to Apple, as iOS and the related infrastructure is brought up to the standard that IBM clients will demand for this to work.
I'm not sure what industries you work in, but it's Apple that, in the last 5 years, has made inroads into corporations that 5 years ago wanted nothing to do with them, and were completely dedicated to their blackberries. I assure you, for better or worse, those corporations have not replaced their blackberries with windows phones or android systems, and in the tablet division, there is only one player, the iPad. Good Technologies shows that Apple now has north of 90% penetration in Fortune 500 companies.
Samsung's Knox Platform is likely going to bring a lot more competition to bear, particularly now that Google has partnered closely with them - so things are certainly going to heat up soon.
Does that mean 90%+ issue Apple devices to some employees? Or simply support (or tolerate? Or turn a blind eye to?) using them on the corporate network and/or corp email? Or something in between?
"The Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform currently manages iOS, Android and Window Phone devices, so these are the only platforms included in the report. BlackBerrys, for example, are managed via BlackBerry Enterprise Service/Server (BES) or directly via Microsoft Exchange; as such, they're not represented in Good's report."
"Talking specifically about tablet activations, iPads made up 91.4 percent of all activations, while Android represented just 8.6 percent of tablets activated by customers."
Corporates tend(ed) to use Blackberry for their management / key people. Those people tend to use Apple and Android for personal use.
(Big) Corporates tend to use IBM for data intensive / traditional mainframe roles (transaction processing, etc). Big ticket stuff.
(Big) Corporates tend to use Exchange. Great chance to cross-sell a now internal product, Blackberry, which was already approved by information security obsessive corporates. But Blackberry is unpopular, BBN its only selling point.
IBM now say 'Apple is OK too, we trust them'. Said executives now demand an iPhone / iPad app, which in reality was already developed 2-4 years ago, but only distributed to people in information security / in-the-know because they really wanted it and could get it. As Apple can now be cross-approved on the same terms as IBM, vendor approval is easy.
Not release a cooperation agreement, but this has been in the works for several years. Apple gain a lot. Not sure what IBM gain... perhaps cloud agreements with Apple? Perhaps support agreements, perhaps something much bigger?
Relying on IBM for enterprise support? My expectation is they will not be able to live up to the level of quality expected when Apple's name is attached. Much like HP, IBM has outsourced a lot of their support arm and companies I know who had moved their IT support to HP are now bringing it back in house. I expect the same pattern would hold if one adopted IBM.
Cringely is very clear about the charades IBM is playing to maximize the short term buck.
People change, organizations change and the world changes. To survive you must adapt. Why not mention the Microsoft investment in 1997? Or the partnership with Cingular/ATT in 2007? Or were those not really evil empires?
That ad worked because customers at the time associated IBM with the impending corporate monolith. IBM was just the whipping-boy for the larger idea. (Much like how today Apple is the whipping-boy for Foxconn manufacturing scandals.)
It became apparent soon after that Microsoft was the real threat to Apple's business model.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadHis Intel switch bet played off for Apple and I imagine this bet by Tim Cook will also play out for them. I look forward to having many more years of iOS work and many more years of Xcode and iOS SDK improvements :-). Stability and security will be at the top of the lists :-D
Don't forget the HP-branded iPods too, which was also a bit weird. That was under Steve too.
> Thanks to HP's distribution network, the iPod+HP was sold in retailers where Apple did not have any presence at the time, which included Wal-Mart, RadioShack, and Office Depot. Many of these retailers now sell Apple iPods.
In hindsight, the subsequent sales explosion makes it look unnecessary [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod+HP [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales
-- http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple his laptop of choice was an IBM Thinkpad (560E). In fact, "he delivered it to Apple’s designers as a model of where the PowerBook line needed to go."
http://applefool.com/applefool/IBM_ThinkPad_560E.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
IBM and Microsoft signed an contract, that IBM AT clone computers would ship with Microsoft DOS and they would license (and pay for) every-single-copy of it. The openish IBM PC standard allowed for Microsoft to continually expand into their near monopoly on the Business, and Home PC market.
That agreement literally built Microsoft. When they signed that agreement, Microsoft didn't even own the rights to DOS, or had even made an OS. They just licensed a BASIC compiler.
Neither my memory nor the Wikipedia history suggest any formal IBM role in the development of 'Windows' itself, at least not through Windows 3.11. It wasn't a joint project (though I suppose the closeness of the partnership likely meant source/fix/feature sharing behind the scenes).
Then, IBM was formally cooperating with Microsoft on something they thought would be OS/2. To the extent anything co-developed then wound up in Windows NT, that was never IBM's intent. Again, Windows was the Microsoft-controlled branch, not the partnership product.
That would roughly match the assertion by rational-future about which you were dismissive.
This is for iOS a greenfield space, where Apple wants to lock up their position as the standard mobile platform. Apple can win without working too hard to displace the incumbent (likely Blackberry).
Although, anecdotally, at conferences with business types carrying laptops the majority seem to be MacBooks. I think Apple may be creeping in a bit.
Combined with extensions in iOS, I wonder if we can expect to see similar partnerships soon across the enterprise space?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
Seriously.
http://www.cbc.ca/undertheinfluence/Welcome%20IBM.%20serious...
It will be interesting to see how this works out. The one thing Apple lacks is the monster enterprise salesforce that IBM has. And that may be the strongest thing that IBM has left.
look at net income.
For the three months ended 29 March, Apple had $10.223B in net income. For roughly the same quarter (ending 31 March), IBM had $2.384B.
Apple is carrying $18.949B in cash and cash equivalents (though most of this is locked-up overseas), and another $22.401B in short-term marketable securities.
IBM is carrying $9.409B in cash and cash equivalents, and a mere $295M in markable securities.
As soon as you figure out what a product actually does, you realize you could replace it a shell script that took 30 minutes to write.
The point is to get managers to buy something from IBM so they can have push notifications.
But the kicker is that my job here revolves around VMware and Windows. VMware's web client needs a newer version of Flash than you can get on Linux outside of Chrome. And Chrome dropped RHEL 6.x ages ago. And every RDP app packed with RHEL 6.x is junk compared to CoRD or RDCMan.
If I could BYOD I'd happily go buy a new MBA and IBM could toss it into a Blendtec when I'm done here.
Go to w3, search for "approved OS" and take your pick. I'm currently running fedora 20 with mate desktop. Works like a charm on a T430.
Haha, there's got to be a name for that paradox: you want to run Linux on your brand new computer, but the hardware isn't well supported.
Do you:
a) Settle for a Linux install that sometimes does weird things (on my Lenovo Yoga 2, I have to close the laptop lid and re-open it to get the computer to come back from suspend properly).
b) Settle for Windows 8?
Unless you've got the time to write your own device drivers, the MBA is the most "rational" choice for a new laptop. (IBM pun not intended.)
Looks like it's still the case: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/37916/what-are-t...
Apple is gonna make IBM build a cloud base infrastructure with Apple User interface and QA. We are talking very high end costumers, not the typical small or medium corp. No one will be fired for buying Apple and IBM. Google, maybe.
Enterprise Cloud was one Horse race for Microsoft market. Now there are two.
A bit more than a few years. They still have pretty good profits (Windows and Office are still quite popular,) and even if that dried up suddenly and they had zero revenue, they could quite literally live on their cash reserves for a decade.
[edit: downvotes, seriously? I'm just pointing out that Microsoft is not a private company that can do whatever it likes with its cash pile if it is not performing. I guess that is uncomfortable for some reason.]
The problem for Apple is their secrecy and planned three year obsolescence is unattractive at scale for large businesses. A large part of IBM's continued relevance has been from their shift toward solutions leveraging open source as well as providing customers with clear roadmaps.
Without trying to sound too harsh, the problem with Google is that they have a faddish focus, and don't appear to maintain some product offerings once they are past the "look! It's NEW!" phase. If you made the recommendation to switch to Google's systems, would your manager be asking "How long is it going to be there for?". It's a pity. Do you see "enterprise" switching to systems like that? Do you see loads of Chromebooks and Chromeboxes (do they even still make them?) on desks instead of PCs? Honestly?
This is different to Microsoft's strategy where you can still run software from 20 years ago, and some businesses like only investing in software once, instead of an ongoing licensing fee. I do not see Microsoft disappearing quickly, despite how popular web apps are in startup circles; Windows still rules the enterprise desktop.
I myself write software on a Mac but everybody else here has never used a Mac and are flummoxed if presented with its desktop, and typically see Apple products are overpriced.
High end customers would involve large corporations where there would be a need for many PCs traditionally. Although iPads have become popular with BYOD, do most people just accept that it's a great consumer (consuming) device and not marvellous for creation of content? If large corporations were to switch their desktops to Apple machines, do you think the profit margin would increase or decrease?
It just isn't going to happen.
I wonder whether Apple will bring IBM up or will IBM bring Apple down on that front.
While the UI of its client sucked compared to anything we see today, those were the days of Windows 3.1. Everything sucked back then.
It has aged poorly. But it had its place, and its time.
Those SPs were pretty massive too, hundreds and hundreds of lines long, calling other hundred lines SPs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_flakes
(Only kidding; the market is large enough that different devices can cater for different needs and price ranges. There appears to be a trend to see something new in this industry and proclaim the demise of other businesses due to them not making this new product or offering this new service. It's short-sighted.)
My impression is the opposite; there's only one iPhone. The whole BYOD thing happened because if you gave employees Blackberries they'd still go out and buy iPhones.
BYOD doesn't scale directly.
The only meaningful differences for IBM I see are that it can throw a bunch of iPhones into the deal and bundle them under the service contract with Apple's blessings and that IBM can use iPhones in literature and dog and pony shows.
Also you seem to have missed the part where IBM state that they are going to develop more than 100 apps.
It's a perfect synergy[1], with IBM having dropped hardware some time ago and subsequently, most software, in favour of open-source + prestige R&D + consultancy services. Apple on the other hand, makes some of the best hardware around and turns a good profit doing it, and they also have some of the best software UX (if not necessarily the most powerful solutions). Put the two together and it's an extremely potent combination, as long as they can pull off the collaboration effectively. Apple is already making fairly serious inroads into corporate IT since BYOD became a thing. To a lesser extent, they've been a business brand longer than they've been perceived as purely consumer-oriented, with the design industry being the only thing that kept them alive in the 90s pre-iPod-turnaround.
It will also be interesting to see what impact this has on open source, because that's something that IBM currently supports heavily so they can avoid the cost of developing a lot of common business software in-house. This partnership might herald a preference for, for example, Apple servers running OSX, over Linux.
A more positive outcome is that we're likely to see significant improvements in Apple software to meet needs that IBM clients will demand: stuff that tends to sit on a dusty shelf for years, like fixing SMB support in OSX, might start seeing some serious engineering investment by Apple.
We also might see an end to Apple's "no rollbacks" policy, which IMO is a serious barrier to adoption in corporate environments (and is a huge pain for testing). No IT department worth its salt will ever push out a possibly breaking change like an OS update without a rollback plan, but Apple actively prevents that right now. Either that, or Apple will need to up it's release cycles to match the way SaaS is typically managed and take bug reports more seriously, although probably only when they come through a priority channel reserved for corporate customers, much like how Microsoft handles "unofficial" hotfixes that don't go into Windows update.
[1] Apologies for using the word "synergy" but it really is appropriate here.
This initiative probably has the MS Office 365 marketing people salivating.
The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with).
Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.
http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoo...
Some documents that I've prepared in Excel with complex (meaning not all that complex) don't come into Numbers properly (a stacked bar with one series as a line, for example).
It's not just the macros but 100s of little things that break compatibility.
If you use Numbers with Excel for anything but the most basic spreadsheet list you are going to have a bad time.
Its something of a stereotype but generally Excel to "something else" is less painful than old Excel to new Excel.
Your post all seems to be very consumerist. IBM sells servers. Apple does not sell servers. IBM sells their own server hardware. IBM dropped their x64/x86 servers recently.
Apple makes consumer hardware, IBM makes expensively marked up enterprise hardware.
IBM makes TERRIBLE software, apple makes shiny consumer stuff, the absolute most that will come out of this is sametime and or notes getting a small bit more attention from IBM on iOS products. Most of IBM's crap is a thinly veiled customisation on top of Eclipse, it makes me laugh thinking about how that will translate to an iOS device. IBM's server side software, while marginally better - what apple hardware is that going to run on?
IBM clients couldn't give less of a hoot about samba shares in OSX. This news will have approximately zero effect.
IBM doesn't even make their own servers anymore - selling that business to lenovo (IBM only makes mainframes).
I assume this is relatively neutral for both parties, and reflects the deterioration of technical competence at IBM.
IBM will act as a giant sales arm, and apple would fulfill whatever contract IBM can land. only question is how big the scale they can accomplish together. you would think IBM enterprise is naturally large scale but not necessarily justifying largest-market-cap-in-the-world. apple's still going to need major consumer hits to keep growing.
Apple has $574bn market cap last check, to IBMs $190bn. Apple would almost need to acquire IBM to move the needle, and selfishly, as an apple-convert, i hope they aren't actually considering that.
would be a true shame for apple to stop building the consumer products of our dreams, to build some soul-less bullshit for "enterprise" courtesy of IBM. risk of the great dream dying.
also big risk of the IBM culture and mindset infecting apple.
i'm sure steve jobs would get a huge kick out of apple throwing a lifeline to IBM, thinking back to the 80s when IBM was "big blue" and a formidable technology competitor.
i could see steve going ahead with this for kicks, which is about how i think apple is going to approach it. can't harm apple if they ring-fence the work, and don't let IBM management practices become apple practices.
http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/ http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/10/analyzing-ibm-analytics/ http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/15/ibm-back-ussr/
Can Apple support the cloud analytics needed to process the large amount of human-generated, personal sensor data for the many enterprise verticals that will be transformed by this data?
IBM has invested in "Smart City" initiatives, urban-scale control and coordination. Pick your favorite sci-fi movie. There is potential here to marry the personal operating system (Apple) and the city-state operating system (IBM).
Earlier this year, IBM adopted an ARM-like approach to their Power architecture, licensing IP to "OpenPower" partners. For example, here's a $4.88 billion joint project on servers & software for smart cities in China.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-07/14/c_1334823...
---
The joint project with Chinese firm Sichuan Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies Co. Ltd follows their announcement on May 18 that they will build a service center dedicated to the big data and cloud computing that is necessary for smart cities.
... "Cooperation with IBM will have an immense impact on the construction of smart cities in the world and fast-track the R&D level of high-end servers in China by 10 to 20 years," said He Wenjun, chairman of Huaxun Zhongxing Technologies.
The smart city concept was invented by IBM.
In 2012, China selected over 130 cities as pilot sites for a smart city program that will explore ways to foster a new type of urbanization.
---
No. Which is why they are looking to IBM to condense this "big data" on the server side and stream it to the iOS devices.
It is OK to think that way re hardware. But it is backwards re software. IBM sold off almost all their hardware divisions (laptops, printers, storage) because they make their money on services. IBM is basically a consultancy nowadays. IBM is doing what they do here: selling software consulting services and solutions that run on Apple. Apple isn't going to do any development work for this at all.
Lately I've been heavily involved in a project[1] that tries to improve this situation - sort of a next generation Notes based on CouchDB, with fully relational data models, extremely fast development cycles and upcoming mobile+offline clients. Mid-term we want to offer interfaces to Notes/Domino, such that migration becomes a matter of hours per application. I'm curious to see, how IBM wants to solve the inability of Notes to be fully integrated onto iOS - their announcement didn't even mention it, it rather seems like they want to sell you expensive consulting months to create each application from the ground up using their cloud platforms. Cost-wise this will be multiple orders of magnitude off of what we're trying to offer.
[1] http://protogrid.com
+1
This deal is just a press release. I imagine that an enterprise willing to pay up for Apple hardware, is not the kind of enterprise to settle for vendor-lock in mediocrity in software, while the PHB's buying enterprise class mediocrity from IBM will not pay up for Apple hardware.
I wonder how many reports Jony Ive has to him compared to his equivalent number in IBM.
What Apple and IBM have really done is join an ongoing movement, something that has been going on for years. People already have these iPhones in their pockets, these iPads on their desks, and they very naturally have been integrating them with their life-and-business processes.
Sure, Google would love to have the IOS cache, but this deal more reinforces IOS market dominance than "disrupts" it, the leader.
It's not even a technical change for Apple... the same devices, used in the same way (I think they'd fail brand-damaging if they tried to suddenly be "enterprise", you need "dirt under your fingernails" as Cook said).
However... the imprimatur of IBM will open the floodgates for all those enterprise VP waiting for a sign that it's time to switch. (Just as the IBM PC did for personal computers?). Suddenly, the herd of VPs will place orders, each massive in their own right, overwhelming even Apple. That's the budget that previously was allocated to desktops/laptops...
So, in a market sense, this is arguably the key to the disruption. And looking back, the moment the dam breaks might well be seen as the disruption (rather than the warning drips and trickles). Certainly the most consequential.
It shows up over and over again, but its a failure of reasoning: on average no one uses any specialized software on a desktop, just a web browser and spreadsheet. But the average is not a real person to start with. All the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bits of custom code people use to do their jobs do not easily translate to locked down mobile environments. Heck, ask anyone using Excel for a lot of work: there's more VBA out there that's utterly vital then anyone would care to admit.
If Apple aren't breaking into enterprise with Macs, they're not going to somehow manage it with iOS except in the same space they always have.
Agreed tablets won't replace desktop completely - just as desktops didn't replace mainframes completely.
I imagine a normal distribution, over how much PC functionality is needed, by how many people. On the left, people who hardly need a PC - they've already switched to mobiles. Then the middle, the average, where they need a spreadsheet/word processor (to varying degrees). Finally, on the right, tapering off into specialized domain software (including your VB scripts), CAD/CAM, simulation, desktop publishing, animation, visualization etc. This is the long tail you mean, where each person requires a different subset of functionality.
There'll be a process of adoption, step-by-step, left-to-right, which eventually will get stopped (perhaps at spreadsheets?). The question is whether IBM can create apps that really do meet their customer needs well enough to displace desktops. There are many roles where they can.
And if we look at degrees of usage, perhaps if some role only needs occasional spreadsheet access, they might have one PC in the office (instead of one on each desk). Or, rearrange job roles so specialist does that. Or, perhaps google spreadsheets are "good enough" for their use. Or maybe some specialised app, with their exact subset of functionality will rise to the fore - that will actually be better for their specific use, because customized to it... today, software is far cheaper to build than when spreadsheets became standardized and ubiquitous.
One last data point: it could be that iPads become desktops. Add a keyboard and mouse and a stand... This isn't disruptive of the usage, just of the supplier!
The data point is that that's how I use my phone, with a bluetooth keyboard. I'm using it now. I do most of my programming and ssh on my phone now. It is awkward in some ways (mainly, the bt keyboard sucks), but mostly is more convenient than my desktop.
So maybe this isn't really "opening the floodgates" as I first said, just the beginning of a trickle, as IBM starts to displace desktop usage in the enterprise, role by role.
iOS with a small i is Apple's OS for their devices.
They went to court over the difference, so it is important (to them at least :-)
Besides this being just a traditional PR move by both companies (Apple doesn't have traction in the enterprise market, except for CEOs wanting the IT dept to support their iPhones -- and IBM doesn't have traction in the consumer market, nothing could be more boring than IBM products), this is two companies with cultures on opposite extreme sides of the spectrum.
Ol' Stevie would probably be very angry.
I don't think IBM wants to sell _both_ a corporate data initiative and a new phone at the same time.
In those areas, and many other corporate enterprise areas, Apple is on is already on its way out, specifically because they never really integrated or put any special effort on integrating with the existing corporate infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has used this time that Apple squandered to finally catch up for the most part.
A lot of large corporations gave Apple a chance 5 years ago and nothing ever really came of it. They will not be getting another chance any time soon.
Apple has already been doing a lot of work over the last couple of years geared towards making iOS more acceptable to enterprise and we're clearly going to see even more progress in that direction.
Say what you will about the quality of IBM's software and services, IBM probably understands enterprise-scale IT better than anyone else. A lot of that knowledge is now going to be transferred to Apple, as iOS and the related infrastructure is brought up to the standard that IBM clients will demand for this to work.
Samsung's Knox Platform is likely going to bring a lot more competition to bear, particularly now that Google has partnered closely with them - so things are certainly going to heat up soon.
Does that mean 90%+ issue Apple devices to some employees? Or simply support (or tolerate? Or turn a blind eye to?) using them on the corporate network and/or corp email? Or something in between?
"The Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform currently manages iOS, Android and Window Phone devices, so these are the only platforms included in the report. BlackBerrys, for example, are managed via BlackBerry Enterprise Service/Server (BES) or directly via Microsoft Exchange; as such, they're not represented in Good's report."
"Talking specifically about tablet activations, iPads made up 91.4 percent of all activations, while Android represented just 8.6 percent of tablets activated by customers."
Corporates tend(ed) to use Blackberry for their management / key people. Those people tend to use Apple and Android for personal use.
(Big) Corporates tend to use IBM for data intensive / traditional mainframe roles (transaction processing, etc). Big ticket stuff.
(Big) Corporates tend to use Exchange. Great chance to cross-sell a now internal product, Blackberry, which was already approved by information security obsessive corporates. But Blackberry is unpopular, BBN its only selling point.
IBM now say 'Apple is OK too, we trust them'. Said executives now demand an iPhone / iPad app, which in reality was already developed 2-4 years ago, but only distributed to people in information security / in-the-know because they really wanted it and could get it. As Apple can now be cross-approved on the same terms as IBM, vendor approval is easy.
Not release a cooperation agreement, but this has been in the works for several years. Apple gain a lot. Not sure what IBM gain... perhaps cloud agreements with Apple? Perhaps support agreements, perhaps something much bigger?
Cringely is very clear about the charades IBM is playing to maximize the short term buck.
It became apparent soon after that Microsoft was the real threat to Apple's business model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_600
PowerPC? And the Fab IBM is trying to sell but no one wants?