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Daring to Dream: Apple & IBM
Anonymous writes "The Register has
a comment piece of the marriage (speculative) between IBM and Apple. Although wildly speculative, it is not improbable. With IBM already supplying PowerPCs to Apple and Apple having not signed up to IBM's PowerPC consortia, there are hints in this get-together. Apple would also supply IBM with the "lifestyle" side of things. If it does happen, it would be most interesting."
Cool! That would be akin to my lifelong dream of an asteroid passing the planet and infecting all bears with some kind of mutation that would make them as big as godzilla and give them a taste for people filled buildings. Life is too boring without that kind of thing happening more often.
In other news... didn't Jobs market the Mac as being anti-suit, anti-corporate, anti-business, anti-IBM originally? Oh well, if we had republicans voting for Kerry and deomcrats voting for Bush this past election, ANYTHING is possible.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I'll give you the ego bullet hands down, and the cultural one is also valid but I would argue the first two. As the article states, apple has tried, with limited success, to get into the HPC and business side of things. The XRAID is, $ for $, some of the best cheap/dumb disk out there. With IBM filling the high - middle end, apple could come in on the low end of business hardward and help out. With IBM pimping Apple's business products they could gain ground fast.
IBM growing it's services biz and apple not having one is okay, they compliment each other. Apple has a reputation for building easy to use interfaces on top of *nix hardware/software. I'ved used OS X server and it makes running apache/mysql/etc. a lot easier for a *nix novice.
I've been a long time apple fan and I would be cautious of this merger. I'd hate to see apple's "style" or whatever you want to call it formed into the mainstream by the behemouth that is big blue.
-or so you'd think
The basis of this whole story is that Apple is absent from the PPC Consortium roster? Yikes!
For all we know, some editor could have forgot to put Apple's name in there. Or maybe Apple is still sitting on the fence about it, who knows. But this isn't even a "rumor" yet.
You'd think that by now, more people would've figured out a basic trait of Steve Jobs: he's got his own will, and he'll hit eject before he compromises it. A lot of people think that means he has a huge ego, and maybe he does, but that's not the point - he's spent an awfully long time trying to make the world see things his way, and he's not going to stop just because someone offers him a pile of cash.
A lot of industry writers don't seem interested in understanding Apple's motivation (which of course means trying to understand Steve), so they ascribe standard corporate motives, and we end up with wild-ass rumors like this. But of course that doesn't work, and they're wrong a lot (they're right sometimes too, but how many crazy rumors have you heard?), and so the industry looks at Apple like they're the crazy unpredictable man-child of computing. Who happened to get lucky once or twice with the iMac and maybe the iPod. Won't happen again.
But the thing is, they don't want to be on par with other manufacturers, and they don't want to beat them at their own game. Apple wants to change the rules and beat the others at Apple's game. That's the approach they've taken for a long time - iPod being probably the best example. It's also why Apple won't release a sub-$1000 machine, even though it might mean huge market share.
So in short, the article's another load of poorly thought-out crap. The idea that IBM could/would buy Apple is like saying that when you hit the lottery, your boss will be cleaning your house - the transaction has to go both ways, and as willing as IBM may be (and I'm betting they're not), Apple won't bite.
every good
IBM has wanted to get rid of Microsoft for the last 20 years or so without much success. Microsoft takes a big chunk of the profit in the low margin corporate PC business which does not leave much money on the table for HW vendors. IBM is a company that built its brand recognition on (at least perceived) quality, reliability and security of its products. Being forced to rely on a Microsoft OS as the most user visible part of a corporate IT solution is a disaster. The latest round of security problems with Windows XP and IE over the last year may have pushed IBM over the edge.
For the server side of the corporate IT market, IBM can rely on Linux or internal IBM OS variants. For desktops and notebooks there is really no option to Microsoft since the death of OS2.
If IBM chooses to offer Apple desktops and notebooks as part of their corporate solution portfolio, this will immediately make Apple products more acceptable from the perspective of CIOs. OSX user interface is easy to learn and use and OSX already supports the Microsoft Office suite, which is pretty much the only desktop (un)productivity suite used by most corporate customers.
Since we're all in the wild speculation mode, what about this as another possiblity: IBM licensing Mac OS X and working with Apple to produce business-class OS X systems with IBM branding. (sort of like what HP did with the iPod)
/iMac sales.
As has been stated here often enough, Apple does not really have what businesses need in a machine: inexpensive (relatively) headless machines that can be dropped into an office cubicle. And there's a good reason for that. An Apple workstation for $800 or so would cut into their Power Mac
However, if IBM were to release one only available to businesses it might satisfy this need while allowing Apple to protect their core business. IBM could then add their own software or add-ons to integrate with their server line. Maybe even ship the systems with Office pre-installed for businesses.
Whether corporate America would buy into it or not is another story, but it makes for an interesting thought.
I do. I worked there. I was one of the system administrators.
You should have seen how the Apple developers (the biggest portion of the developers were from Apple) responded when they all got RS/6000 machines on their desks! They hated them. It was a big honkin' square boxy machine with a clicky keyboard, and a command line. And though the monitor was color, when it booted up, the console looked like a green screen. But it was a PowerPC machine, which they did like. (We used IBM RS/6000 Model 250 machines, which were pizza box shaped 66 MHz PowerPCs. Some of the very first PowerPC machines ever made, I believe.)
Anyway, after a while, sometime in 1994, IBM sent over a bunch of developers. They mixed with the Apple people OK, but they were definitely from two different worlds. The IBM people all brought OS/2 machines with them, and they were just as devoted to those OS/2 machines as the Apple people were to their Macintoshes. Plus they all dressed differently and thought differently. But not entirely differently. They managed to get some work done and build some cool stuff together.
It is also far more likely that this a join venture rather than an take over would happen. Apple licenses the OS to IBM, IBM creates business-oriented Mac-compatibles complementing Apple's home-oriented lines. IBM and Apple get to point at each other as a second source (the main advantage x86 PC vendors have over Apple or IBM trying to sell POWER/PowerPC kit).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This theory seems to bring together several loose threads floating around. First, were the rumors last week that IBM was selling it's PC division to some firm in Asia. Next, was the fact that these new cell Processors will be amazing, but Windows doesn't like anything but x86. IMHO, it seems that IBM is planning on selling their wintel PC division, and own the PC market later with cell processors run a new improved Mac OS. Think about it, the only reason Macs never caught on were because people didn't use them at work (didn't want to learn something new for home), and they were too expensive (Apple couldn't take advantage of Economies of Scale the same way Dell can). IBM will make Macs rollout well in large enterprises. People will be able to buy them for their home. And they will be orders of magnitude faster than their Wintel counterparts which are stuck on x86. I don't want to say it, but the combination of a new hardware platform(Power Cells), and a viable alternative in the corporate and home enviroment [IBM/Mac], and the server market [IBM/Linux] may spell the end of the Windows monoculture. Or I may just be getting my hopes up. I'm allowed to dream, aren't I?