Apple's Partnership With IBM Is About The Victory Of Design Over Data

The joint announcement today by and about a partnership to sell apps and hardware to enterprise customers is a big win for Cupertino 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 , 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.”