Place your bets.
Frenemies: A Brief History of Apple and IBM Partnerships
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2460973,00.asp
Steve Jobs battled a number of tech rivals, but in the early 80s, his ire was largely directed at IBM. The professional squabble dates back to at least 1981 with Apple’s “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” ad, and seemingly ended just yesterday with a joint agreement to bring IBM’s enterprise software to iOS devices later this year. But while the companies have indeed clashed over the last 30 years, yesterday’s pairing was not the first time these two behemoths have teamed up.
Take AIM
Just 10 years after the first salvo was fired between Apple and IBM, the two joined with Motorola in 1991 to develop a standard for the PowerPC architecture that could go against the Microsoft-Intel Wintel alliance. The Apple-Intel-Motorola (AIM) team took IBM’s Power instruction set architecture and turned it into a consumer-friendly version that was manufactured by IBM and Motorola and used in Apple’s Macintosh line from 1994 to 2006, when Apple - to which Jobs returned in 1997 - transitioned to Intel-based machines.
Apple And IBM Want To Believe It’ll Be Different This Time
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2014/07/15/apple-and-ibm-want-to-believe-itll-be-different-this-time/
Apple’s Tim Cook and IBM’s Ginny Rometty certainly sounded persuasive when they announced a broad alliance between the two companies today to sell mobile devices and services to the enterprise. Rometty told Re/code only their two companies could make such a deal happen. Cook noted the lack of competition and said when that happens, “You end up with something better than either of you could produce yourself.”
And in theory it sounds great. Apple gets an enterprise sales force with its long tentacles deep into companies across the globe. IBM gets the devices best suited for those companies in terms of security and trustworthiness with corporate IT. And maybe this is the winning hand both companies think it is. The good news is that neither is really going “all in” to find out.