Post-PC era: IBM goes Mac.
A couple of days ago the news broke that IBM is going to acquire over 200,000 Macs for its employees, and now we have learned that it is developing a plan to transfer companies to the computer system developed by Apple for almost 35 years, represented today by the powerful OS X.
The program is called “IBM MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services» and consists of cloud services for companies that want to make the leap to the Mac environment from their current systems (it is understood that mainly Windows PCs). This movement has to do with the inevitable drop in PC sales and with the need for companies to find a way to carry out their work in a reliable context. With a faltering Microsoft with Windows (Windows 10 has already gotten 14 million installations in a few days, but what is a tiny amount for the total number of computers that have Windows installed), that the different versions are not fully stabilized and that things are changing without really knowing how, is causing many companies, including a giant like IBM, to wonder if it is not better switch to a more stable system. And this is probably the main cause, but not the only one.
Let us remember that IBM is the creator of the so-called compatible PC, which began its journey with MS-DOS (from Microsoft as we all know) and which managed to relaunch itself with the appearance of Windows 3.1, which gave it an impressive boost in the business world, finally being stabilized with the appearance of Windows XP. IBM decided to abandon PC manufacturing in large part because of the very market environment they had created (liberality very high standards and minimal clamping to some common rules), caused them to see themselves pushed into the background since the late 80s, and since theirs has never been retail and their corporate clients had long since passed on the PC clone, they decided in the mid-s 90 that there was no point in continuing this anymore, and they sold their PC division to Lenovo some time later (and which has been their main supplier, at least until now, and probably still for a while). Thus, for about 20 years they have stayed away from the subject, but… With the alliance with Apple last year, it is clear that something has changed. Those who had been irreconcilable enemies now spoke to each other, and got along well. Proof of this is the enormous amount of equipment that they are going to acquire on the block.
It may be proof that the business world has finally realized that times have changed. That things can no longer stay the same. Home users are leaving more and more in flight (basically because most do not need a PC, which has become evident with mobile phones and tablets) while Macs do not stop selling more and more. Apple’s critics may keep saying it’s a matter of luck, but it’s not. I have seen lifelong PC users switch to Mac almost without blinking and shamelessly admit that if they had to go back to the PC they would have a hard time. The era of the empty cloned PC (that has always been Windows, an empty shell that had to be filled so that it could be used for something) is over and if someone like IBM realizes this, we can think that in a few years, the large companies and their subsidiaries will begin to abandon that old PC (which will surely survive only among gamers and computer freaks) to welcome a system, at least in my opinion, much better. Time will tell us, at least for those of us who listen to what it tells us…
