14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Jobs would probably never allow this to happen. Yet, Tim Cook just inked a deal to enter a business with IBM and further pursue Apple's dreams to conquer the enterprise.
Back in 1981, Steve Jobs was taking a trip to New York and he didn't miss the opportunity to take a picture of himself flipping the bird to IBM.
In 1984, Apple released their ad with a woman throwing a sledge hammer into the "Big Brother" machine. At the time, "Big Brother" symbolized Apple's rival, IBM.
And here comes 2014. Apple's CEO Tim Cook explains how his company will work together with IBM to go towards the enterprise market. The report comes from Re/Code and CNBC, and it is an actual double interview with Tim Cook and IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty.
The change of plans is that the two historical competitors have agreed to help each other to make this happen. Tim Cook even agrees that Apple and IBM do not compete on anything, and he saw this as a puzzle where the pieces fit nicely together.
Ginni Rometty believes there are three main goals for this joint venture. They hope to achieve growth for both companies, they seek to reimagine businesses and address Security.
Tim Cook says this was a multi-year journey for Apple. "We started investing in enterprise in iOS 2. The penetration in this business is still low so it's a huge opportunity here. We knew that we couldn't do that alone. We fit together like a puzzle. We've come from 30 years ago being competitors to being complementary."
Rometty even says that her company is the Gold Standard in Enterprise and Apple is the golden standard in consumer electronics. They aim in harnessing big data and analytics plus cloud computing services and mobility.
According to Re/code, the deal calls for IBM and Apple to develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on iPhone and iPad. IBM also agreed to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will move 100,000 people to develop this kind of apps.
In the interview published by CNBC, Rometty and Cook came up with an example about airline pilots that will have an iPad to decide how much fuel they need for a certain flight just like they need an iPad now to read all the manuals.
Steve Jobs and IBM
