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Apple’s Partnership With IBM Is About The Victory Of Design Over Data
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2014/07/16/apples-partnership-with-ibm-is-about-the-victory-of-design-over-data/

The joint announcement yesterday by Apple AAPL -1.42% and IBM IBM -1.4% about a partnership to sell apps and hardware to enterprise customers is a big win for Cupertino and a big boost for Armonk. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but I suspect that Apple CEO Tim Cook was able to extract favorable terms from IBM CEO Virginia Rometty. The two companies have evolved from bitter rivals in the early days of the PC (Apple’s famous 1984 ad painted IBM, not Microsoft MSFT -3.82%, as Big Brother) into highly complementary businesses. IBM’s senior vice president of global business services, Bridget Van Kralingen, is quoted in Bloomberg as saying, “We really recognized almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another’s strategy and that there was literally no overlap.”

No overlap, perhaps, but vastly different market trajectories. Apple’s fortunes continue to rise while IBM has withstood “eight consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue declines,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, called the news, “a shot in the arm for IBM and a great validation of Apple in the enterprise space, where they already are a huge success.”

In practical terms, the deal will offer Apple access to IBM’s customers and data analytics capabilities to power enterprise apps. IBM will have something sexy to sell. The interesting point for me was how the two companies approached the messaging around the announcement. On IBM’s MobileFirst page, the first thing you see after the stark announcement of the logos of Apple + IBM is a quote from IBM founder Thomas Watson, Jr., “Good design is good business.” Apple, by contrast, leads with “Redefining the mobile enterprise,” which sits atop a paragraph that explains how “this exclusive global partnership will deliver a new class of apps that connect users to big data and analytics right on their iOS devices with more ease and efficiency than ever before.”