When 27% of those quarterly profits is from the iPhone, the bigger question is how long can apple keep growing in this rate?<p>IBM has its fingers and toes in a lot of things, including SmartGrid, Healthcare IT to name a couple. It is a good bet to say that it will take more than one bad product iteration to knock them off their perch. Ripping IBM off of the enterprise market will be akin to cleaning crap off of velcro. Not easy.<p>Apple as it grows defying expectations has to both make sure that future iterations of its products can keep enchanting their customers as well and stay innovative (at their current click) once Jobs is no longer involved in making product decisions.
Insightful comment on the page: "There are tons of companies that Apple has crushed...IBM is not one of them."<p>Apple and IBM compete in the same sort of way that all humans compete for oxygen: in a not-very-meaningful way.<p>IBM's move into PCs was defensive: As businesses started thinking about adopting these toys built from parts by neck-bearded garage trolls, the company wanted to make sure they didn't get left behind. Would every desk in corporate America have a computer on it today if IBM never got into PCs? I'm not so sure.<p>IBM's always been a top-down company: it sells to bosses who are telling their minions what they're going to be using, while Apple's approach has almost always been much more bottom-up.
IBM is still perfectly relevant in the same target market they have been dominating for the last 100 or so years. Selling things to gigantic businesses. This is their name: International _Business_ Machines.<p>IBM stopped selling personal computers when they stopped being uniquely relevant to big businesses. They still sell mainframes along with a long list of other things.
Apple and IBM do different things in 2011 than they did in 1981. Apple is primarily a consumer hardware company. IBM is primarily a business-to-business software and services company. The author is right, Apple has completely crushed it over the past decade or so...but IBM hasn't been going after the consumer hardware market for awhile. The comparison is sort of apples and oranges. Over the course of 30 years, technology companies will obviously need to adapt to changes.<p>Also keep in mind (and this isn't meant to disparage Apple), but they were almost dead until one man, Steve Jobs took over. It's his vision that brought Apple back from the dead.<p>Over the long term (30 years from now), we'll have to see how that plays out. I couldn't name one specific person at IBM who's responsible for their success and they're doing very well these days too.
Do you think that we need companies like IBM? I mean, by the income metric Apple is obviously better than IBM. But, if there was no IBM, would the space be filled with multiple smaller and more profitable companies, or would there just be a void until some other company emerged as a "big, stable, uninnovative" behemoth?<p>I thought IBM was still doing some great stuff. Maybe not as profitable and cool as some more modern companies, but still very important things which actually do make the world a better place, albeit not making a huge profit. I might be wrong, ofc.
What I find Surreal is that IBM is still the company to beat in 2011. I mean, by 1981 they were already the king of the hill for a good 15-20 years. To put that into perspective, who thinks apple, (or google, microsoft) will be relevant in 2061!!
Apple is not a threat to IBM's core businesses. IBM as it is currently operating is. The current awesome results to investors is at the expense of the US workforce and non-research lab innovation.
What I love about Apple's success?<p>It's mostly based on <i>design</i>: good UI design and good aesthetic design. Apple is almost a fashion company.<p>It's not based on any of the things that the windup MBA idiots always harp on: marketing, performance, salesmanship, connections, etc.<p>Sure, Apple has those things. Apple is great at marketing, their stuff performs well, and they have plenty of salesmen. But so does everyone else. Apple's success is based primarily on aesthetics and user experience, which nearly all players in the industry have ignored completely in favor of the cliches beloved of MBAs.