IBM is a consulting company and courts mid- to upper-level manager types with purchasing authority. After few seconds on the page you are invited to speak with a sales consultant via a popup.
Apple is focused exclusively on the (premium) consumer space.
Both companies represent top-down totalitarianism (I say this without value-connotation): IBM suggest corporate command and control, Apple has a well-curated walled garden.
Microsoft's site reminds me of one of the more effective university websites.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of those companies except as a consumer. My iPhone is my favorite toy.
This serves them well in the Enterprise, where every installation requires customisations (and people can afford to pay for the maintenance of those customisations) but spills over into everything they do, meaning they cannot keep things simple.
The Kin is a case study in everything that's wrong with Microsoft as a company.
In-fighting and turf wars, discarding products they bought up (e.g., Danger) to shoehorn in Microsoft technologies while failing to leverage their own technologies in places where they'd make sense, lack of a cohesive corporate vision, the list goes on.
Ars had a pretty decent post-mortem of the project.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post...
If you're going to go after a very varied audience you should probably think carefully about whether you need to have lots of sub brands (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) so that your customers simply google for the sub brand, or whether you actually can attach some core values onto the parent brand that will be meaningful in all these different markets (e.g. Virgin or Disney). It's no good having a scatter gun product strategy then neglecting your branding and online presence because you sell to everyone everywhere.
Keep in mind neither IBM or Apple had a 20% rate of employee millionaires in 1992.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unlik...