legion said:
IBM sells solutions to the business marketplace (this is where they make most of their money; their semiconductor business is their money lossing segment.)
I can assure you that IBM would not have dumped a shedload of cash into its brand new Fishkill semiconductor manufaturing plant if it was a "money losing segment". It may or may not be a cash cow, but it definitely makes IBM money. IBM is a massive corporation, with more than a few divisions, ALL of which are designed to bring in cash either directly or indirectly. Not to mention a huge part of their business involves the POWER architecture, which IBM controls from top to bottom (including its manufacture - hence the Fishkill plant). Is this money losing too?
No one in the large corporate business world wants OSX on their equipment, so IBM will not be interested.
Consumer sales for IBM is such a minor business. Those who want IBM want AIX or Linux, not OSX.
Those who want IBM on the high end want AIX or Linux, yes - however you seem to have forgotten the huge volume of PC's they ship with Windows installed.
This is where OSX is best positioned to compete as far as IBM would be concerned. I'm sure that IBM would like nothing better than to ditch Windows (they've already tried a few times (OS/2, Taligent/Pink, ...)), but Windows is what most businesses have wanted, and IBM (at least in recent history) has learned to deliver what the customer wants as part of the whole "solutions" focus. This may, however, change in the near future with the overall cost of Windows rising with every security hole.
OSX provides none of the truly benefically factors that UNIX does to the business world (part of the reason why OSX has been unable to qualify for the UNIX name; they have corrupted a lot of the securities that BSD has implemented in order to make it a desktop/grandma friendly system.)
This is patent nonsense. OSX doesn't qualify for the UNIX trademark because it's owned by the Open Group, and Apple has not ponied up the cash for the name and the compatibility testing required. This is why the Open Group has thrown a fit that Apple is calling OSX 'UNIX based'. The Open Group also owns the POSIX specification (not strictly UNIX, but widely implemented in the UNIX world), which costs money to even get at the documentation - on a side note, Linux is largely POSIX compatible, but was implemented largely by reverse engineering the spec, as Linus Torvalds didn't have the cash to buy a copy of the official (Open Group) POSIX documentation. None of it has anything to do 'corrupted BSD securities'. In fact, I can't think of an example of any inherently 'BSD securities' that Apple has broken with OSX; filesystem permissions, protected memory, separate users, packet filtering, sudo, ssh - they're all there. In fact, some of those are even additions to the 'original' BSD 4.4-lite code from which OSX (and the FreeBSD based 'BSD subsystem') are derived. As far as I can see, the one thing OSX doesn't implement is kernel securelevels, but since the OSX kernel is Mach based and not BSD based, it's a bit hard to fault them for that. Not to mention most SYSV ('AT&T' UNIX) based Unices don't have that either, so it clearly doesn't get in the way of being certified as an official UNIX(tm) (as AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX are). That's not even getting into the fact that most of the 'approved' UNIX versions have more holes than Swiss cheese in the default install, especially compared to the free *BSD's and OSX. In short, security isn't a big issue when talking "Official UNIX" - shelling out cash is. OSX offers ALL of the benefits of UNIX
with ALL of the benefits of an easy to use and administer desktop OS - I don't see why any company wouldn't want that.
For some reason, Apple fanatics think Apple is primetime for the business world, but nothing in Apple's playbook says they are ready to tackle that field. They don't have the support infrastucture or the deployment or equipment capabilities. IBM generates a lot more revenue than Apple has ever paid to IBM, so they could care less. Remember IBM is a computer company started in the late 1800s and have been in the mainframe business for a really long time.
No, Apple doesn't at present have the setup to support OSX 'in the enterprise', but
IBM does. Consider the situation where IBM licenses OSX to sell to major corporations, on IBM PPC hardware. In other words, Apple could handle the consumer side, which they are best at, and IBM could pitch the 'business version' of OS X to the "Fortune 500" companies everyone keeps whinging on about as being the only thing that matters. It would have the potential to be win-win for both IBM and Apple, especially with the backlash building against Windows with every new virus/worm. Apple gets the 1st class business support that only IBM can provide, and IBM gets the 1st class OS that it's been looking for ever since Billy Gates skunked them and started selling DOS to the PC clone makers. However, I highly doubt this will ever happen with Steve Jobs at the helm - he won't give up control of his baby without a fight, his megalomania will never allow it (which also explains the whole "themes are dead" thing, among others...). There is also the problem of 'clone' sales cannibalizing Apple, as happened in the period leading up to Jobs' return - which is another reason it will probably never happen. Apple is, after all,
a hardware company - it only makes software to get you to buy the hardware. If they had to compete against IBM, even indirectly, they would be steamrolled. It would only work if IBM bought Apple outright - which brings us back to problem #1: SJ would never allow it. A bit of a bummer for seeing IBM OSX hardware, but it may well be for the best.
