IBM and Apple’s new enterprise partnership is already being called one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships ever.”
But outside of selling more iPads, iPhones and Macs in business, what else could Apple get out of the deal, which was announced Tuesday? According to a new report, Watson — IBM’s Jeopardy-winning A.I. capable of understanding natural language.
IBM and Apple used to be sworn enemies, but a lot has changed since the early days of the Macintosh and the PC race. Both companies have committed to making Apple software and hardware a one-stop shop for businesses in what some consider one of the “most important and powerful tech partnerships” ever.
In an interview with CNBC, Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty discussed their mutual excitement about the “landmark” partnership.
Today Apple announced that it’s partnering with IBM to “transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps.” The relationship will combine IBM’s enterprise data specialties with Apple’s iOS hardware and software.
“iPhone and iPad are the best mobile devices in the world and have transformed the way people work with over 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and over 92 percent of the Global 500 using iOS devices in their business today,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement. “For the first time ever we’re putting IBM’s renowned big data analytics at iOS users’ fingertips, which opens up a large market opportunity for Apple. This is a radical step for enterprise and something that only Apple and IBM can deliver.”
There are four key areas that Apple will be working on with IBM:
From sledgehammer-tossing freedom fighters to misunderstood teenagers at Christmas, Apple’s TV commercials have hit us with some truly iconic imagery over the years. But when a company has been around since the 1970s, it’s no great surprise that a select few ads would slip our collective memory.
After scouring through hundreds of big-time commercials and tiny TV spots that promoted Cupertino’s products over the years, here are our picks for the Apple advertisements that time forgot. All of them are worthy of a second look — and almost all of them for the right reasons.
For the second time in a row Samsung has been found guilty by a U.S. court of ripping off Apple’s patents, but according to the jury foreman in the latest Apple vs Samsung case, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence or testimony that sealed Samsung’s fate.
Jury members met with the media after being dismissed Monday morning, including ex-IBM executive and jury foreman Thomas Dunham, who said the revelation that Google agreed to protect Samsung from damages on a couple of patents in the trial was the biggest shocker of all.
Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android has thrown the company into the courtroom more times in the last five years than ever before, so in an effort to make U.S. patent laws bend to its will, Apple has joined forces with some some of its old enemies, IBM and Microsoft to form a U.S. lobbying supergroup to fight patent trolls and push new legislation through congress.
One of the big problems with focusing on a broad metric like mobile platform market share is that it ignores some of the more important (and complex) questions about how these platforms are actually used.
For example, which customers are most valuable in terms of spending money?
Apple has topped the list of world’s most valuable brands for the third straight year in a row, and is now worth almost twice as much as any other brand on the planet, Forbes reports. The Cupertino company is now valued at $104.3 billion, up 20 percent over last year, which puts it way out in front of Microsoft, Samsung, and even Google.
Things haven’t been going all that well for HP on the PC shipment front, but it’s hoping to make up for that with its new high-tech Project Moonshot servers. In fact, HP CEO Meg Whitman is so jazzed about her company’s new servers that she’s even going around bragging that Apple might be considering HP for its iTunes services.
Despite increasing competition from the likes of Samsung and Google, Apple continues to be the world’s most valuable brand, according to the latest annual BrandZ report from Millward Brown.
The Cupertino company was one of three technology firms in the top five, with Google and IBM placed in second and third respectively.
Towards the end of each year, IBM Research publishes a list of five things it predicts our gadgets will be capable of within the next five years. While some of its predictions seem a little too outlandish and farfetched, others — such as its 2006 prediction for realtime speech translation — become a reality.
IBM’s 2012 list is all about the five senses. It predicts that by 2018, our gadgets will help us touch, see, hear, taste, and even smell. Your smartphone, IBM believes, will use new technologies to simulate the physical sensation of touching something, while your tablet will be able to taste your food.
When you just look at the money Apple made in 2012 it’s pretty incredible. But when you provide some context to those earnings and put Apple’s profits next to the competition’s profits, Apple’s performance is absolutely mindboggling.
From October 2011 to September 2012 Apple made more money than Microsoft, Ebay, Google, Yahoo! Facebook and Amazon combined. In that same period, Dell, Asus, Intel, Acer, IBM, Lenovo, and HP (basically the entire PC industry) only made $19.3 billion in profit, which is less than half of Apple’s profit.
Source: Statista
Apple has climbed up to the second spot in Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands” survey of 2012, with an estimated brand value of $76.5 billion. The Cupertino company is second only to Coca-Cola, worth an estimated $77.8 billion, and it leaves IBM, Google, and Microsoft trailing behind.
Could IBM’s Watson replace Siri? That’s an interesting question and IBM’s answer appears to be yes. Big Blue is working to turn the supercomputing solution that made news when it beat Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter into an app that could run on a smartphone. If successful, IBM will turn Watson into a supercharged version of Apple’s digital assistant.
Susan Kare, the graphic designer famous for creating a number of icons for the Macintosh, will be called as a witness in the ongoing trial between Apple and Samsung. Kare will reportedly talk about the similarities between the user interface graphics on the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy devices.
While most CIOs and IT leaders are taking steps to reduce their reliance on RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), some major BlackBerry business customers are ready to abandon RIM’s services and its BlackBerry smartphones in one fell swoop. The latest company to announce such a migration is the Australian airline Qantas.
The company told the Australian (registration required) that it had made the decision to trade its 1,300 BlackBerry devices and related service packages for iPhones. The move, which Qantas expects will deliver significant cost savings, follows a company-wide survey in which a “large majority” of employees said that they’d prefer iPhones.
Like other companies and organizations that have announced similar transitions this year, Qantas chief information officer Paul Jones pointed to the iPhone’s ease of use and popularity as reasons for selecting the iPhone.
Apple has gotten a fair amount of flack over Siri – most of it relating to Siri not recognizing words or phrases, misinterpreting requests, or providing incomplete or inaccurate answers. Apple is even facing a class action lawsuit over Siri not working as promised by iPhone 4S ads.
For IBM, however, the concern isn’t that Siri won’t work as advertised. Big blue is worried that Siri will work exactly as advertised and that confidential and sensitive information will leak outside IBM’s network as a result. For those reasons, the company disables Siri on the iPhones of its employees.
May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac,
IBM is one of the newest entrants to the mobile management market. The company launched its IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices in March. At the moment, IBM’s feature set is focused on device management with limited app management capabilities. It will appeal most to companies that are already using other IBM solutions. Although Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices can be used as a stand alone mobile device management tool, it will be most effective when integrated with IBM’s various Tivoli enterprise solutions including endpoint management and help desk packages because it will be able to key off existing organizational systems making for easier setup and a streamlined overall management experience across the board.
Back in 1985, Big Blue (IBM) was the big bad competition for Apple. So, of course the sales team at Apple, including Steve Jobs, decided to make a video. It being the mid-eighties, the theme obviously had to be the hit of the season, Ghostbusters.
Did you know that Steve Jobs played the role of FDR in a colossal World War II styled Apple commercial? We’ve seen glimpses of Steve in his FDR costume from a video made to celebrate Jobs’s 30th birthday, but we never knew the context of why Jobs was dressed up like the former-U.S. President until now.
After the success of their 1984 Super Bowl commercial, Apple created a broad-cast quality production titled “1944” that was designed to motivate Apple’s international sales force during a 1984 company meeting in Hawaii. Apple supposedly spent $50,000 on the production that used a mix of professional actors alongside prominent Apple figures. The 9-minute commericial uses a World War II theme to focus on the battle between Apple and IBM, with El Jobso taking up the mantle of FDR. The entire video is pretty bizarre and terribly corny, but definitely worth watching.
Apple’s operating systems and its software are generally believed to be the best available in terms of security and stability, but a new report from Trend Micro reveals that’s a huge misconception… at least in recent months. In fact, the Cupertino company suffered more vulnerabilities during the last quarter than rivals like Oracle, Google, Adobe, and even Microsoft.
Following comments made by Google co-founder Larry Page yesterday, which suggested Steve Jobs’s thermonuclear war against Android was simply “for show” to rally the troops, Walter Isaacson has confirmed that Page is wrong, and he has insisted that Steve’s war against Android was real.
IBM, once known as on of the most straight-laced companies in the world, has jumped on the BYOD bandwagon with a level of enthusiasm rarely seen in such large and established enterprises. The company has big plans for BYOD – rolling out a program out that covers all 440,000 employees worldwide.
That’s a big challenge and one that Big Blue has yet achieve. However, the company currently has mobility solutions deployed to about a quarter of its workforce (120,000 users) two thirds of whom (80,000) are supplying their own devices and service plans. The company, which had been a predominantly BlackBerry shop, began to shift gears as iPhones and other devices began showing up in its offices.
While not a model for every company, IBM’s BYOD policies can serve as a great starting point.
In Phoenix, Arizona, rain is a commodity scarcer than a purple elephant slowly lumbering down Main Street. Consequently, people go straight up loco when their iPhone’s weather app predicts rain. Most of the time the hours sadly glide past and the clouds and precipitation never show up. A collective mourning rumbles across the city, and meteorologists cower under their desks, ashamed at their disastrous predictions. They never can quite seem to predict the rain.
It’s sad that we can put a man on the moon but still suck at predicting the weather. IBM’s mind-blowing “Deep Thunder” iPad Weather app is seeking to change all that though, by becoming the most insanely accurate weather predicting tool ever.
Another year, another title. Fortune announced their list of the world’s most admired companies this morning, and Apple swept away the competition for the fifth year in a row. Each year Fortune surveys the business community to find out which company has the best reputation in the eyes of their peers. Apple has ranked at the top of Fortune’s annual list for the last five years which ties them with General Electric for the number of most appearances in the top spot.