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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Tailored is exactly what IBM wants. They are basically a consulting and services company nowadays, having let go most of their hardware divisions after analyzing their business and deciding they weren't profitable. They will be exceedingly happy to sell you consultants time to tailor the apps for you, in fact, if the app didn't require tailoring, they probably wouldn't want it in their line up.

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I'm an IBM consultant. A large portion of our revenue comes from services. I'd say it would be correct to classify IBM as a Consulting and Services company now. More so than software and hardware. We still do a lot of software but the bread and butter is consulting. We're basically exiting low margin hardware businesses. Also the original comment is correct that most enterprises don't want out of box solutions. They almost always want something customized.

I still don't know very much about the IBM and Apple deal. It almost seems like Apple is trying to leverage the IBM brand to get into enterprise business but we'll have to see how it plays out.

I'm amazed by that decision (to leave the hardware & software biz). Look at Apple -- that's pretty much all they do, and they have a $650B market cap, 4x that of IBM.

I suspect Apple and IBM's software and hardware businesses have different margins. Another comment said that IBM still does some software work, but has basically exited 'low margin hardware' business.

Whereas Apple's software is nearly all free (and used to supplement hardware sales) while their hardware is extremely expensive for consumers and has huge margins.

It's not simply that Apple is in the hardware biz, it's that Apple has a strategy for the hardware biz that enables 40% margins. They're an outlier. None of their hardware competitors have that.

If someone could show IBM a strategy for their hardware that had those kind of margins, I bet they would stay in hardware.

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