

Apple and IBM: This Time It’ll Be Different - microtherion
http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/24/shift-happens-apple-ibm-this-time-itll-be-different/

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guiambros
This time _is_ different. It's like comparing apples to lemons (pun intended).

IBM is now a professional services company. They have almost half a million
employees worldwide, not considering the many thousands of contractors. That's
5x more people than Apple.

IBM is in the business of 1) selling people's time, and 2) selling some
software, to justify selling even more of people's time. Hardware is not a
priority anymore.

Those who have worked in professional services industry know there's a cap on
how much you can charge for each employee. Maybe 2-3x the salary, which will
get you to the $200-250K range. Maybe a bit more if you have teams with unique
skills (e.g., lawyers, scientists, creative talents), but nothing even close
to the revenue per capita that a product-based company commands.

Case in point: IBM just got to #1 position on AdAge's ranking of digital
marketing agencies [1]. Yes, digital marketing agency. A few years ago they
weren't even showing up in the rankings.

Apple, on the other hand, is in the business of creating products out of
hardware + software. That requires a much smaller scale, given that 80% of the
manufacturing is outsourced. So when you look at the revenue per employee,
you'll end up with much bigger numbers.

But a better comparison would be to add _all_ the employees of Apple's direct
suppliers. Just Foxconn, for example, has 1.29M employees and 40% of its
revenue coming from Apple. Add it all up, and things start to look a lot more
similar to IBM.

[1] [http://adage.com/article/agency-news/2014-agency-report-
reve...](http://adage.com/article/agency-news/2014-agency-report-revenue-
staffing-stocks-digital/292849/)

------
jseliger
_These aren’t isolated bad endings. If you have the time and inclination for a
nostalgic stroll through the list, you’ll see many more such disappearances._

This seems to be true at the smallest scales of businesses as well as the
largest ones. I wrote about the phenomenon among smaller businesses here: "In
business there are very few true partnerships"
[http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/in-business-
there-a...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/in-business-there-are-
very-few-true-partnerships/) .

A lot of junior consultants take a surprisingly long time to learn this.
Evidently a lot of large companies suffer the same challenges.

------
sounds
I'm going to stir the hornets' nest and throw out a simple challenge:

Apple has lost their mojo. The implication is that Apple has lost their way
"post-Jobs."

...

When they partner with the company they used to poke fun at (1984
Commercial)...

When the big news in the article is: "Valley gossip has it that IBM issued an
edict stating that Macs were to be supported internally within 30 days.
Apparently, at some exec meetings, it’s MacBooks all around the conference
room table — except for the lonely Excel jockey who needs to pivot tables."

Is this Apple ascendant to fill the power vacuum as Microsoft crumbles? I
think it's actually Apple being assimilated into the larger corporate world
where Microsoft was only ever a small fish, even in their heyday.

"Hi, I'm a mac, and I'm a PC." Geeks always knew that Macs were, technically,
Personal Computers. But I think I can see cracks in Apple's claim to "think
different."

Apple set a high bar with Mac, then iPod, then iPhone and iPad. When they
haven't had a WWDC keynote I've bothered to watch in years...

I'd love to be proven wrong. :)

~~~
camillomiller
If you haven't seen the last WWDC, or if you have seen it but didn't like it
as a programmer, I guess you'll be hard to convince.

~~~
sounds
I shouldn't need convincing. Apple's own actions should be proof enough, don't
you think?

~~~
camillomiller
Well, maybe that's my sketchy English, but I guess that's what I said. The
last WWDC was the one to convince you, not me or anybody else outside of
Apple. Proofs are effective if you don't degrade them constantly to worthless
actions because of a former prejudice (not saying that's your case, but it's
the case for many).

------
Nerdfest
Apple and IBM both survive due to blind fans and platform lock-in. In Apple's
case it's consumers, and with IBM it's corporations.

------
cwyers
"I asked WolframAlpha for per employee, per year revenue and profit
comparisons and got this:"

What? You did division of some trivially-obtainable numbers. Why do I care
that you did this in Wolfram Alpha, and why on God's green and spinning earth
did you need to put the answers in two PNG screengrabs, rather than just
typing the answer out into a single sentence?

~~~
jimueller
Because the author, probably not the submitter, decided to do that in their
article on their website. Also, as trivial as it may be to get revenue and
employee numbers from annual reports, it only takes a few seconds to do in
Wolfram Alpha.

~~~
cwyers
I feel like most of the time savings were eaten up by making a bunch of little
screen grabs to show us it was done in Wolfram Alpha. And it makes the
information take up about five times as much space as it would if it was just
written out in a sentence, and since the alt-text for each PNG is "Wofram IBM
Apple Revenue" and "Wolfram IBM Apple Profit" the information is entirely lost
for, among others, search engine bots, blind people using screen readers and
any cached copies that have the text but not the associated images.

~~~
nizmow
I came here for a bit of expert commentary on the article. I can only assume
it must be pretty water-tight if we're sitting around arguing about _this_...

