So Apple and IBM are officially in bed together now. Announced this Tuesday, the two of them are teaming up to build a pile of enterprise apps for iPhone and iPad, stuff for retail, banking, insurance, whatever "MobileFirst for iOS" ends up meaning in practice. IBM brings the data and analytics muscle, Apple brings the hardware and, I guess, the part where employees dont actively hate using their work phone.
I had to sit with this one for a minute because it's genuinely strange to me. Anyone who's seen the 1984 Macintosh ad knows the whole point of that commercial was IBM as the faceless Big Brother on the screen, and a woman in red shorts hurling a sledgehammer through it to set everybody free. That ad is basically why Apple has a personality at all. And now, thirty years later, theyre co-branding.
I spent two summers in college doing tech support for a small accounting firm that ran everything on IBM AS/400 terminals, green text, function keys, the whole deal, and the idea that IBM would ever be caught within ten feet of something as consumer-friendly as an iPad would've gotten you laughed out of that server room. IBM was mainframes and beige boxes and men in suits. Apple was the company selling colorful iMacs to art teachers. They werent even really competing with each other anymore by 2014, which is probably the whole reason this deal makes sense and doesnt feel like a merger of enemies so much as two old guys who used to hate each other running into one another at a wedding and realizing neither one cares anymore.
Practically speaking this is obviously about the enterprise market, which Apple has wanted for years and never quite cracked the way it wanted to. BlackBerry still has a foothold in a lot of big companies purely on inertia, and IT departments trust IBM sales reps in ways they will never trust anyone from Cupertino. So Apple gets IBM's sales force and credibility, IBM gets to look like it still matters to anyone under 50. Fine. Makes sense. I just wasnt expecting to feel a little nostalgic pang reading the press release.
Also worth mentioning, because it happened the same week and got buried under all the Apple-IBM coverage: Microsoft announced Thursday that it's cutting up to 18,000 jobs, the biggest layoff round in the company's history, and about 12,500 of those are coming out of the old Nokia devices unit that Microsoft only just finished buying back in April. Which is a rough way to find out your new employer doesnt need quite as many of you as it thought. I dont have anything clever to say about that one honestly, it's just a lot of people losing their jobs less than four months after their company got bought, and I keep thinking about how weird that timeline is if youre one of the ones affected. You update your LinkedIn to say "Microsoft" and then three months later youre updating it again.
Anyway. The bigger story this week obviously wasnt a tech story at all, and with everything going on with the Malaysia Airlines flight, tech news felt like a strange thing to be writing about. I went back and forth on whether to even post something normal today. But I dont have anything useful to add there that a hundred people with bigger platforms havent already said, so I'll just leave it at that and go back to writing about phones.
Back to normal posting later this week I think. I've got a NAS build I've been putting off writing up for way too long, and it's not going to write itself.