IBM and Apple just not that big a deal | Hacker News Reader

IBM and Apple just not that big a deal

cringely.com

63 pointsableal39 comments

I commented, perhaps over-enthusiastically, in the other thread, about what a great move this was for both parties. I stand by that, although I am definitely thinking about what it means in the longer term, not just the immediate impact of the deal.

The points that seem to be getting widely missed (including by Cringely) are that:

(a) Apple is clearly making a serious move into enterprise, where they have not fared well against Microsoft for a long time and, since the return of Jobs, positioned themselves as a primarily consumer-brand to avoid fighting that losing battle. This move demonstrates that they are now serious about being not just a consumer brand. Clearly, they really want to take some enterprise business away from the incumbents, which primarily means Microsoft.

Partnering with IBM gives them a ton of credibility that they did not have last week. The fact that it's a "partnership" is important. This is not just IBM building some apps and Apple taking a 30% cut. They don't need a partnership for that.

(b) It should be obvious to most people on HN regardless of what they think of the brand, that Apple isn't run by a bunch of idiotic short-term thinkers. Clearly this is part of a long term strategy. Getting iOS deeply embedded into enterprise is just the first move in making Apple part of the enterprise ecosystem. Selling more iPads is nice, but selling iPads, and OSX Servers, and cloud services, and apps at 30% markup per seat are all even nicer. Finding ways to lock those enterprise clients, with their huge budgets, into the Apple ecosystem for 10+ years is nicer still.

Of course IBM benefits from this as well, but as others have pointed out, IBM is mainly a consultancy service that deals with lots of partners, so this doesn't have much strategic value for them - they are just following where the money is going. The strategic importance to Apple however, is immense.

I think it is kind of spectacular, really. IBM used to own and control platforms, but morphed itself into a service company that didn't need to own hardware or OS platforms. Now Apple, a platform company, that does good applications only as a sideline to sell the platforms... has just partnered with IBM.

If it's a real partnership (sometimes these things end up just being nothing more than a Press Release when new management takes over or the teams can't work together)... this could be really huge.

> Finding ways to lock those enterprise clients, with their huge budgets, into the Apple ecosystem for 10+ years is nicer still.

No, it's not.

And if there's anyone at Apple thinking that (I'd bet there isn't), they'd be guilty of idiotic medium-term thinking. Locking a customer into Apple for 10+ years means tying Apple to that customer for just as long. Gather up enough of them and they'll be deadweight holding Apple back whenever they most need to change.

These are exactly the chains that prevent Microsoft from doing anything other than continuing to steer the "good ship Windows" right into that iceberg. If Apple really is voluntarily putting them on... then they really have lost their way.

I don't know... by partnering with IBM, they deflect a little of the weight from those customers to big blue. Apple is still a consumer focused company. Apple tried (and failed) to move Mac OS and Macs into the enterprise. I doubt they'll let iOS become beholden to it.

One example of this is how long the iPad 2 was available. That was the first form factor that was adopted by enterprise for particular vertical applications (kiosks, custom apps, etc). Even though Apple kept coming out with new models, they still kept selling the old version, and made the new iOS versions as compatible with the iPad 2 as much as possible. But it didn't limit what they did with their new models. I see this going in much the same way, but with IBM acting as an intermediary between enterprise customers and the consumer-focused Apple.

That assumes that Apple will be beholden to enterprises and forced to stop innovating the way Microsoft did.

Given the enterprise market is much smaller than the consumer market, that isn't going to happen.

IBM gets lock-in through support contracts. Apple gets lock-in through their proprietary ecosystem. Those are two very different things. There is no need for Apple to be beholden to any particular client.

It's a trap. Apple's always been the company whose products people want to use. Going for enterprise lock-in runs the risk of turning Apple into another company whose customers have no choice.

There is no such thing as an OSX server. You mean a mac mini with OSX server edition on it?

There's basically nothing that IBM does that will work on an iOS device, nevermind well. This deal is hot air, Cringely is right.

Microsoft make their money on office and exchange, as much as it pains me to point the obvious. [0]

No port of IBM software to work on an iOS device is going to make a dent in that. No IBM software will be exclusively iOS, it will be java based and available on windows and linux first, then OSX as an afterthought.

http://www.tannerhelland.com/4993/microsoft-money-updated-20... [0] see operating income rather than revenue.

There isn't even really OS X server edition anymore. It's literally just OS X with an code to download Server.app (a $19.99 app) from the App Store.

I still believe that a lot of people are missing a strategic move from Apple here. IBM is probably the largest player in Healthcare IT. Apple has recently made a large push into collecting Healthcare data and I strongly believe that if wearables are to take off, collecting/monitoring health info will be a huge part of it. I think this partnership is about Apple taking that new healthcare data and make it easy to share with hospitals. Health care is this GIANT market that seems to be often ignored from an IT/startup area, I worked at a mobile healthcare startup for a while and if Apple can use IBM to force their way into that market it could be a HUGE win.

That's a very interesting observation and almost certainly something that will have been considered at some point.

I don't think ignored. It's just way easier to build snapchat than fight with HIPAA compliance and all the regulations against rapid innovation in health care.

Isn't the biggest player Epic Systems? At least for the expensive, profitable stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

Epic is everywhere in hospitals, but at $1.7B in revenue, they're only a fraction of the size compared to McKesson ($140B in annual revenue). Cerner, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, Pyxis, and others are all big players throughout the value chain.

I don't see IBM as a big player in Health IT. I think they desire to be a big player which is why there's all sorts of noise about Watson and healthcare. It's marketing aimed at the C-suite.

Epic systems is probably the IBM or Microsoft equivalent in health IT. McKesson, Siemens, and Cerner are also no slouches.

Hmm, it's possible that my contacts and friends in health IT have led to selection bias on my part. A quick google seemed to confirm my original train of thought but lacked any real numbers so it's entirely convincing that it's all marketing fluff like you say. My personal heath IT experience was aimed at individual doctors office level systems and the test users tended to tie back to Watson and IBM cloud services. That said I know A LOT of heath is still woefully bad at having e-records so it was likely a tiny slice of the market that we targeted.

Its easy to say that its not that big of a deal from a perspective outside of MDM. I recently graduated college and started working as a developer for an MDM provider. Its very hard to say that this news is not that big of a deal. Most likely, this is completely right and it is not a big deal. Apple will use it to 'partner' with IBM and sell some more product.

If they do a serious partnership, maas360 could quickly become the leading MDM provider. This would change the face of a developing industry. This influences several of the big players in tech. VMWare, Samsung and even google will have to see where this goes and decide how to react.

I think this analysis may not be correct, as the author forgets about one thing IBM has and Apple needs to compete with Google - Watson.

See also Asimov's short story "The Machine That Won The War" - http://www.olivenri.com/machine_won_files/The_Machine_that_W...

What changes for IBM? They could already write iOS business apps and they could already sell support contracts for iOS devices. All that's there is the ability to mention an official relationship with Apple during dog and pony shows. Still if the client says "What about Android?" the response will be "Here's a proposal for Android based options".

If I were to hazard a guess, I think this relationship is driven by Apple's inability to dogfood their logistics infrastructure - Apple can't run the supply chain Cooke built with Apple products. They're the sort of business that is likely to be a customer for IBM's systems integration expertise. Apple needs iPhone apps that help it run its business.

I think, to the extent this relationship is serious, it is desperate on Apple's part. They are giving up their one market advantage, control in exchange for entry into a market where calling things "magical" won't cut it. What matters is vertical integration and Apple doesn't have it on the hardware side. The only way they can maintain control is to purchase IBM.

It's amazing how much the markets has moved that this is no longer significant. Once upon a time, the PowerPC and Kaleida were considered groundbreaking. In the end they mattered very little in market impact, except perhaps for introducing smart engineers to each other.

I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that Apple has more Datacenter capacity than IBM. Can anyone validate that?

IBM owns Softlayer, and had significant datacenter footprint before that acquisition available through SmartCloud (deprecated).

(http://www.softlayer.com/data-centers)

Also, I can't help but feel that this conveniently ignores the fact that this deal makes IBM able to Procure Apple Devices (iOS and Mac)for their customers, and more importantly will allow companies to Buy/Finance those devices through IBM Global Finance. Then, with the extended Applecare, those same enterprises will be able to have on-site AppleCare fulfillment/repair/replacement for those devices.

Cringley doesn't seem to assign any value Apple gains by (I'm assuming) preventing IBM from pushing Android.

This seems to me to as much about countering Android as improving sales into large enterprises.

Since Apple has partnered with IBM, its once arch-enemy, I wonder if Google will partner with...Oracle, to enter in enterprise. Wouldn't that be funny.

But I'm actually hoping that doesn't happen, and Google has other avenues they can use to enter enterprise more forcefully anyway.

Did IBM ever view Apple as an arch-enemy though? I mean, sure Apple had the 1984 ad, so it was pretty clear that Apple thought of IBM as an enemy, but was the sentiment returned? I doubt IBM ever really gave them that much credit. And by the time that the new Apple came around, IBM was already well on it's way to being the services giant it is now.

But, boy, would an Oracle/Google partnership be funny to watch from the sidelines.

Apple and IBM worked very closely on PowerPC for years.

Cringley doesn't seem to assign any value Apple gains, ever. As far back as I can remember he's always been down (and wrong) about Apple.

He was an apple employee at the beginning. Offered stock, held out for the cash...probably a little bitter. He said this in his triumph of the Nerds documentary (quite good), and its repeated in wired.

"He worked with Steve Jobs in the early days of Apple, and when Jobs offered him shares in the company as payment, Cringely held out for payment at $6 an hour. "Let's not think about that," he says.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/cringely_pr.html

It's a symbolism thing.

It gives Apple more credibility and a better ability to sell products into enterprise. Value increase right there. And their employees now have to take enterprise requests (customization, security) seriously, since IBM is a stakeholder).

It gives IBM an excuse to hire/fire people to meet the quality standards of Apple. They get to shift their culture and orientation with real business cause. The employees will look up to Apple now that Ginny's endorsed the friendship.

It's not just a deal. It's a symbolic partnership as well.

There's a lot of talk about MSFT but in some ways this is about greenfields and removing the last stronghold of RIM. This extends my take away from the last WWDC. Apple seems really focused on creating a hw/sw platform that other business build huge businesses on top of. They used to have to do it all but now they seem quite happy to stop at the shore and watch others sail on their ocean (big announcements around health care partners, now this enterprise partner etc)

>I guarantee you meeting those standards will be a problem for IBM, but that’s not Apple’s problem.

As a company that outsources IBM work, this can not be stated enough.

I'm wondering how Swift plays into this? Was this time chosen to release Swift to assure IBM's success in meeting these standards? Really makes you wonder about the timing of everything.

You can produce shitty UX in any language. Also, IBM isn't exactly starting from scratch here; they've been developing iOS apps and frameworks for several years.

He got that completely wrong. Enterprise apps won't go thru the regular Apple AppStore. They will be provisioned directly onto iOS devices via https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/enterprise/

It's conceivable that, as part of the deal, Apple allows IBM to build their own 'IBM iOS Appstore' to provision these apps to all iOS devices sold by IBM via special provisioning certificates.

Then what standards these apps will be held to is in question.

> Apple can always use new channels, especially if they hold inventory and support customers who aren’t price-sensitive.

um, that can for any business.

only... Apple does a good job in not holding inventory.

I see this as an acknowledgement by Apple that consumer device penetration has saturated. This matches my personal experience.

Is Cringly the only person that writes negative posts about IBM or is that the only thing he writes?

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