How IBM can support Apple’s thermonuclear war with Google

Remember the good old days in the computer industry, when you knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys? Maybe you were an Apple fan who despised Microsoft and all who sailed in her? Or before that, you were an Amiga owner who refused to speak to the guy with the Atari ST? (I do – I was the guy with the Atari ST.)

Of course, it was never really that simple, was it? While the Apple guys were hating the Microsoft guys, Microsoft was writing some of the best (and, if we’re honest, some of the worst) software for the Mac. Competitors and rivals were also partners and suppliers for each other’s companies. The shifting sands of allegiance in the industry have always made a good show.

IBM, seeing its lunch being eaten by plucky startup Apple and its personal computers, teamed up with plucky startup Microsoft and made its own Personal Computers – capitalised, because these ones were Important. Then, when Microsoft started getting a bit too big for its boots, IBM joined with Apple to make PowerPC – like a Personal Computer, but with Power.

Then IBM decided not to develop a version of OS/2 for PowerPC as promised, leaving Apple adrift. Meanwhile, Microsoft was accused for being a monopoly, so Apple and Microsoft formed their own alliance – much to the chagrin of Apple users everywhere, though it may well have saved the Mac from extinction.

You following so far?

Over time, the Microsoft/Apple alliance gradually soured, and its key underpinnings (Microsoft’s web browser as the default for Macs and Apple not developing productivity applications to compete with Office) fell away. Apple moved ever closer to its new best buddy: Google.

Then there was Android. Oh dear.

Apple is no longer best buddies with Google. Neither is Microsoft, which has been blindsided in its search for a mobile device strategy. Even buying Nokia hasn’t helped. Meanwhile, IBM, which had happily settled back into its comfortable dominance of enterprise with whatever PCs people happened to want to use, is having its lunch eaten yet again by BYOD.

This time, though, rather than developing its own devices with a partner it can’t control, it’s teaming up with Apple. IBM gains access to an already-successful mobile device platform, while Apple gets IBM’s imprimatur and a toe-hold in a market it has struggled to capture.

IBM could have re-teamed with Microsoft, but… well… I’m not sure even Microsoft knows what its devices strategy is. IBM could also have teamed up with BlackBerry, long the king of enterprise mobility – for that matter it could have bought it outright for chump change – but perhaps BlackBerry is too far-gone now even for IBM to save it.

IBM could also have teamed with Google, but that would have meant signing on to another OS it did not and could not control. The lesson of Microsoft was a hard one to learn, but IBM has apparently learned it. Apple is not going to license iOS. There are not going to be clones with which to compete. What IBM and Apple do with their enterprise devices will be standard. IBM likes standards.

(Also note that Apple has just released Swift, a development platform for OS X and iOS that will enable IBM and its partners to develop bespoke applications for company-wide distribution on iPads faster than any other approach. IBM likes quick deployment.)

Meanwhile, Apple is expunging Google as fast as it can. Not only with its own Maps app, but with Microsoft’s Bing becoming the default search engine on Apple devices. Any and all connections and dependencies upon Google, however deep, however small, however invisible to users, are being changed. The late Steve Jobs’s assertion that Apple should go “thermonuclear” on Google, revealed posthumously in Walter Isaacson’s biography, appears to have become a kind of fatwah – irreversible and total. Apple and its acolytes, who might once have rallied under the banner of “Anyone But Microsoft,” now wear “Anyone But Google” just as proudly.

At least, for now.

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order