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Comment by throwawayaway | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with IBM.

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.

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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.

I haven't read the book, but I saw a few of Cringely's blog posts. Very good.

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/

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.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-07/14/c_1334823...

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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.

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>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 doesn't make x86/x64 based servers, but they still make servers (IBM Power Systems) that run AIX, Linux, and i (previously OS/400).

> 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.

[1] http://protogrid.com

"Taylor made", random capitalization of words that shouldn't be capitalized... Not encouraging when it comes to a would-be paid service.

Taylor is a proper noun (a name), the actual word they wanted was tailor, like a clothing maker, "tailor made", made exactly for you.

That's exactly my point.

> IBM makes TERRIBLE software

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.

Google IBM design group.

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.

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