Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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