Oracle

Why Apple will never be an IBM

Apple has begun to make me a little bit upset. 10 years ago I was happy with the iMac and the profits that followed it. 10 years later I kind of expected a little more from Apple. I expect a little more from the BIG PICTURE department. I expected them to start “Getting IT”!

I have to go ahead and tell you I am a huge Apple fan. I am now typing this on a MacBook Pro which I just upgraded to 10.5 and love it. I can’t find any more laptop and OS for the money. MacOSX is just a super OS and make my IT life so easy at home.

I think over the past 10 yerars Apple has once again missed the boat. They did the very same thing in the 1990 when they banked it all on education.

While they don’t want to compete with Microsoft or IBM, they have to. They have to become a giant in their space, While Microsoft is failing to deliver with phone after phone and desktop OSes that stink to high heaven, servers that are just to dang slow and bloated. Apple is sitting by doing nothing to fill that void.

Apple can start to compete with Microsoft so they definitely won’t be in the same ranks as IBM anytime soon. But what if Apple decided to build a world classed MacOSX Server with 16 CPU, 64 bit OS, 60 GB of RAM, and a huge cheap SAN. What if they decided to say to hell with Microsoft and move right on to take on the like of IBM or SUN? It would of course end up wrecking IBM and most definitely making fools of Microsoft. Apple could really give Microsoft and IBM a run for their money if they wanted to, but them seem content on selling one desktop at a time to one house at a time and single digit sales of what is a really decent server and why, because they don’t get IT.

What if Apple decided to team up with people like JD Edward, ORACLE and maybe Lotus to run their software too. What if they figured out a way to run the BES server in MacOSX, what if there was a way to manage an army of iPhones? What if Domino now ran on the xServer and we could make huge mail clusters on what is already cheap SAN disk from Apple too? What if you got the tools for free and could build anything the second you turned on you shiny new Mac attached to network storage, and doing authentication against a Mac based LDAP with Mac based accounts hitting up a JD Edwards or SAP application server? Sending mail with Lotus Notes on your Mac with you Mac based Domino routing and build apps for all to use all on a very stable Mac environment?

Life in IT would in fact become very easy and I think this is what IBM, SUN and other big shops envision and yet they all fail to deliver. IBM fails at delivering a decent desktop OS but Apple seems to know how to do that. SUN Fails at delivering a decent UNIX but Apple knows how to do that.  Apple fails to have any killer apps but IBM and SUN both seem to know how to do that. If I were the CEO of IBM or SUN I would look to buying Apple and doing IT Right.

Then I think Microsoft would have their hands full and IBM would have to do some serious gut checks to get the price aligned. In the end Microsoft would end up taking a hit while the world moved to a Apple based IT environment lead by either IBM or SUN on the back end?

I hate to see Apple missing an opportunity to make it big time in big IT.