So yesterday Tim Cook and Ginni Rometty stood up together and announced that Apple and IBM are now business partners. I had to read the headline twice. Apple and IBM. The company that ran the "1984" ad literally about smashing Big Brother — which everybody has always read as a jab at IBM's mainframe-era dominance — is now selling iPhones and iPads through IBM's enterprise sales channel, preloaded with over 100 industry-specific apps built on IBM's MobileFirst platform, aimed at things like retail, banking, insurance, healthcare. IBM Global Financing is even going to help pay for the hardware. Its a genuinely strange thing to see in writing.
I'm old enough (barely) to remember when "IBM" was shorthand for the boring beige box on your desk at work, the thing you used because IT made you, while the Mac was the machine you actually wanted. That contrast was basically Apple's entire marketing identity for two decades. Now theyre co-branding sales pitches to insurance companies. Somewhere theres a Steve Jobs-era ad exec having a very bad day.
Heres the thing though, and I dont think most of the coverage today is saying this part clearly: this isnt really Apple-vs-IBM anymore, hasnt been for years. IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo back in 2005. IBM doesnt make hardware for regular people, its a services and enterprise software company now, and honestly a kind of sleepy one. The company Apple is actually fighting for turf here is Google, specifically Android and Samsung's push into enterprise with Knox. IBM gets a huge distribution channel into IT departments that already trust it (Lotus Notes, System z, all that old-guard stuff), and Apple gets legitimacy in boardrooms that still think of iPhones as "the thing my kid has games on." Its less a truce between old enemies and more two companies deciding Google is the actual enemy now. Which, fine, thats smart business, I just wish somebody in the press conference had said that instead of everyone doing the misty-eyed "sworn rivals unite" thing.
(Small tangent: my first office job, back in maybe 2007, ran entirely on Lotus Notes, and I will go to my grave saying it was one of the worst pieces of enterprise software I have ever had to use daily. Calendar invites that didnt sync right, a UI that looked like it hadnt been touched since Clinton was president. If IBM is bringing that same design sensibility to the apps riding along on these new iPhones, God help the poor claims adjusters and bank tellers who get handed one.)
What I actually find more interesting than the partnership itself is what it says about where the growth is. Apple has basically saturated the "person walks into a Best Buy and buys a phone" market in the US. Enterprise is one of the few places left where there's real headroom, and it's a market Apple has mostly ignored for years because it's slow and unglamorous and full of procurement committees. IBM has spent decades being extremely good at exactly that kind of slow, unglamorous selling. So on paper it lines up. Whether it actually works depends entirely on whether these MobileFirst apps are any good, and enterprise software has a pretty rough track record on "any good."
Also worth saying: this is the second big partnership move from Apple in about a month, after the health data stuff with hospitals that's been floating around. Feels like theres a pattern of Tim Cook quietly building out partnerships in categories Jobs never bothered with. Not a criticism, just noticing it.
Anyway. I doubt anyone reading this on their personal laptop cares much about whether their bank's tablet app runs on iOS now instead of some clunky in-house system. But if you work anywhere near enterprise IT, this is probably going to change what shows up on your desk over the next year or two. My money's on the rollout being slower and messier than the press release makes it sound. It usually is.
World Cup's over too, by the way. Germany took it last Sunday, 1-0 in extra time off that Götze goal. Nothing to do with any of this, I just watched it a second time on YouTube this morning and got distracted for twenty minutes when I meant to be writing about enterprise software partnerships. Seemed worth mentioning.