Horace Dediu of Asymco has hailed Apple’s new relationship with IBM as the biggest news of 2014: “As corporate romances go, IBM and Apple’s must rank among the most unexpected.”
Once upon a time, thirty years ago to be precise, the two companies were deadly enemies as a result of the battle for dominance of the PC market. Now things have changed. IBM is no longer in the PC market and Apple, while still a major player, has become king of the heap in mobile computing:
Nostalgia aside, this new union is profoundly important. It indicates and evidences change on a vast scale. The companies’ antagonism was due to being once aimed at the same business: computing. Since the early 1980s, “computing” came to be modularized into hundreds, perhaps thousands of business models. It is no longer as simple as selling beige boxes. IBM was forced out of building computers and into services and consulting while Apple moved to make devices and the software and services which make its hardware valuable.