What a surprise! IBM and Apple have announced that they are working together. Who’d have thought it? Would it have happened under Steve Jobs leadership? Will it work? The two companies are planning to co-develop business-centric apps for the iPhone and iPad. And IBM is going to sell Apple’s mobile devices pre-installed with the new software to its business clients.
People are suggesting that IBM now has special access rights to certain security features on the devices and that other companies don’t have that kind of access. As a consequence, IBM can supply apps and services that are similar in behaviour to what users of Microsoft devices would expect. What hasn’t been made clear is what the financial arrangements are and what apps are going to be produced.
It seems that the deal is one that favours Apple. After all, they have a smaller part of the smartphone and tablet market worldwide than Android. According to IDC, Android will have about 60 percent of the smartphone market and Apple less than 20 percent. And Gartner are suggesting that Android has over 60 percent of the tablet market with Apple shrinking year-on-year with about 30 percent. And, after all the things Apple have said over the years, it seems an unlikely combination.
Maybe mainframe users will choose to use an Apple tablet and boost the flagging Apple sales that way. It seems hardly likely that a tablet user will rush out and buy a mainframe! Hence my conclusion that the relationship is very asymmetrical and favours Apple hugely more than IBM. Or, thinking the unthinkable (again), is Big Blue looking to take over Apple at some stage in the future – feeling that it can provide customers with an alternative to Microsoft and Android?
Or, perhaps, IBM looked in the mirror and saw itself 50 years ago, being able to dictate what software ran on its hardware and generally disregarding what every other company was doing as it stood in powerful isolation. And we know how that turns out.
I could make a prediction here that in three years’ time Apple will be a division of IBM. I could make a prediction, but predictions are notoriously unreliable. For example, Steve Ballmer, writing in USA Today, 30 April 2007, said: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share”. Or Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, who in 1943 said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”
There are more of these unfortunate predictions. Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp in 1977 said: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”. Or Bill Gates, who in 1981 is meant to have said: “640K ought to be enough for anybody” – although that one probably isn’t true.
Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, writing in InfoWorld magazine in December 1995 said; “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse”. An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, in 1968, said about the microchip: “But what...is it good for?” Or the editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall said in 1957: “I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year”.
These are predictions that are right up there with H M Warner of Warner Brothers in 1927 saying: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Or Decca Recording Co rejecting the Beatles in 1962 by saying: “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out”. And, of course, journalist Stewart Alsop Jr back in 1991, predicting that the last mainframe would be unplugged by 15 March 1996.
Best not to make predictions, or at least not to publish them, don’t you think? But are we looking at Apple’s last days as an independent company?
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 July 2014
Sunday, 21 August 2011
The PC at 30
In the future, IBM will be known as the PC maker of choice for most people, and those PCs will be running a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based on CP/M. Well, that was the view of some people 30 years ago when IBM gave birth to its first PC.
It was on 12 August in a ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, New York that the IBM 5150 made its first appearance. And because IBM was known for making mainframes, this device was called a ‘personal computer’.
IBM didn’t invent the idea of small personal computers, they just wanted a part of a new and growing market place. In those days you could buy small computers like the Sinclair Spectrum, and slighty bigger boxes from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Osborne, and Tandy. The big mind-shift for the IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida, was to construct their PC from parts that were available off-the-shelf. Up until then, IBM had always designed and made what they needed. However, time was precious and development was faster by shopping to get the parts. It was a decision that allowed clone makers a foot in the door.
IBM wrote the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), the part that’s loaded when the machine boots up. Next they needed an operating system. In the same way they were buying hardware components, they thought they’d buy the OS. The best one around was CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) from Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. The story goes that IBM’s representatives waited to see him but he didn’t want to deal with men in suits. Remember back then how ‘cool’ computing was. As a consequence, IBM looked for another source for the operating system. They found Bill Gates. He provided PC-DOS, which was a rewrite of Seattle Computer Products’ (SCP) 86-DOS. The rest, as they say, is history.
Because the 5150 was made from these off-the-shelf component, other companies were quick to copy it. These clone makers badged their machines as IBM compatible. It seems a while since anyone put one of those stickers on a PC! However, because they couldn’t copy the IBM BIOS, they were never 100% compatible in those days. Now, of course, it’s not an issue. And many companies have come on the scene, made a lot of money making PCs, and disappeared again.
The first PC came standard with 16 kilobytes of memory, upgradeable to 64K, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77MHz, a display/printer adapter card, and a 12-inch green CRT monitor. You could then buy IBM’s dot-matrix printer and the necessary cable. This meant you’d be looking at over $3000 for the whole lot!
And now, IBM doesn’t have a PC business. It sold it to Lenovo in 2004. In 1996, Caldera acquired the assets of Digital Research from Novell, and later changed its own name to The SCO Group, and more recently the TSG Group.
It’s always hard predicting the future, even if you invented it!
It was on 12 August in a ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, New York that the IBM 5150 made its first appearance. And because IBM was known for making mainframes, this device was called a ‘personal computer’.
IBM didn’t invent the idea of small personal computers, they just wanted a part of a new and growing market place. In those days you could buy small computers like the Sinclair Spectrum, and slighty bigger boxes from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Osborne, and Tandy. The big mind-shift for the IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida, was to construct their PC from parts that were available off-the-shelf. Up until then, IBM had always designed and made what they needed. However, time was precious and development was faster by shopping to get the parts. It was a decision that allowed clone makers a foot in the door.
IBM wrote the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), the part that’s loaded when the machine boots up. Next they needed an operating system. In the same way they were buying hardware components, they thought they’d buy the OS. The best one around was CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) from Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. The story goes that IBM’s representatives waited to see him but he didn’t want to deal with men in suits. Remember back then how ‘cool’ computing was. As a consequence, IBM looked for another source for the operating system. They found Bill Gates. He provided PC-DOS, which was a rewrite of Seattle Computer Products’ (SCP) 86-DOS. The rest, as they say, is history.
Because the 5150 was made from these off-the-shelf component, other companies were quick to copy it. These clone makers badged their machines as IBM compatible. It seems a while since anyone put one of those stickers on a PC! However, because they couldn’t copy the IBM BIOS, they were never 100% compatible in those days. Now, of course, it’s not an issue. And many companies have come on the scene, made a lot of money making PCs, and disappeared again.
The first PC came standard with 16 kilobytes of memory, upgradeable to 64K, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77MHz, a display/printer adapter card, and a 12-inch green CRT monitor. You could then buy IBM’s dot-matrix printer and the necessary cable. This meant you’d be looking at over $3000 for the whole lot!
And now, IBM doesn’t have a PC business. It sold it to Lenovo in 2004. In 1996, Caldera acquired the assets of Digital Research from Novell, and later changed its own name to The SCO Group, and more recently the TSG Group.
It’s always hard predicting the future, even if you invented it!
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