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Apple and IBM try to team up again

by on16 July 2014



Flogging dead horses

The Tame Apple Press is trying to stir up some enthusiasm for Apple’s partnership with IBM after investors treated the whole thing with a collective yawn. 

Business Insider thinks that the deal was super cool and important. The deal is that Apple's new enterprise deal with IBM, in which IBM will create big data analytics and business apps for iPhone and iPad, and Apple will begin supporting business and corporate customers with a dedicated AppleCare program. IBM will devote about 100,000 staffers to its new enterprise deal with Apple in one function or another, Business Insider enthused.

However we have seen deals between IBM and Apple before and they never turn out well for anyone. The most fruitful was the AIM alliance which gave birth the PowerPC, but given that was also supposed to build a rival platform to take down Intel, it is safe to mark that as a failure. Part of the problem is that you have two companies who have different worldviews. IBM is super conservative and backend and Apple is neurotic and front end. Analysts also have been wading into the Tame Apple Press. Even more pro-Apple analysts like Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said the partnership will not have a measurable impact on Apple. He claimed that Apple has already achieved 98 percent iOS penetration with Fortune 500 companies and 92 per cent penetration with Global 500 companies. He said that if half of the Fortune 500 were to each purchase an incremental 2,000 iPhones and 1,000 iPads above what they were planning to purchase as a result of the IBM deal, it would mean about a half a percent to CY15 revenue.

In other words the iPhone and iPad has already saturated the US business world so Jobs’ Mob Apple won't see very many incremental sales out of it. Of course his figures are bit crap. Citrix’s figures which are a little more accurate iOS is on less than half of enterprise devices in some markets, and in its best market Android still commands one of every five mobile business devices. Apple has failed to do anything significant in the oil and advertising business. This would mean that there is some scope for Apple and IBM to make sales. This would be dependant on whether or not IBM, which is supposed to be making Apps so that the Iphone and Ipad can work on corporate networks better is able to do that.

 

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