“IBM Corp’s recent move to partner with Apple Inc to sell iPhones and iPads loaded with corporate applications has excited investors in both companies, but two rivals say they are unperturbed for now,” Euan Rocha and Alastair Sharp report for Reuters.
“Top executives at Dell and BlackBerry Ltd scoffed at the threat posed by the alliance this week, arguing the tie-up is unlikely to derail the efforts of their own companies to re-invent themselves,” Rocha and Sharp report. “‘I do not think that we take the Apple-IBM tie-up terribly seriously. I think it just made a good press release,’ John Swainson, who heads Dell’s global software business, said in an interview with Reuters in Toronto on Thursday.”
“PC maker Dell and smartphone maker BlackBerry are in the midst of reshaping their companies around software and services, as the needs of their big corporate clients morph,” Rocha and Sharp report. “BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen similarly downplayed the threat of the alliance in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday, likening the tie-up to when ‘two elephants start dancing.'”
“Chen told the Financial Times that BlackBerry was in early discussions with some companies about working together in parts of the enterprise market, but did not name them,” Rocha and Sharp report. “Whether a BlackBerry-Dell partnership will materialize is unclear for now.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What is it about Apple’s hapless roadkill that compels them to repeatedly insert their feet into their mouths? Beleaguered Dell has nothing and smooshed BlackBerry has even less.
Apple+IBM vs. Dell-BlackBerry would be like all-stars from the Red Sox+Yankees vs. the Kansas City Blues-Houston Buffaloes, two defunct minor league teams.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Stereotype” for the heads up.]
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Apple’s deal with IBM is a strategic strike in a larger war – July 17, 2014
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Apple+IBM: Winners and losers – July 16, 2014
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Apple+IBM take on the enterprise: Beleaguered Blackberry another big loser – July 16, 2014
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Tim Bajarin: Apple-IBM deal is bad news for Google and Microsoft – July 16, 2014
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Apple’s IBM alliance kills Google in the enterprise – July 15, 2014
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s memo to employees: IBM deal builds on Apple’s incredible momentum in the enterprise – July 15, 2014
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Microsoft to begin axing thousands of employees as soon as this week – July 15, 2014
They didn’t take a lot of things very seriously that resulted in subsequent implosions in each company. Fool them twice, shame on them. As the other old saying goes “Better to stay quiet and not look stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
Dell, have a global software business? Isn’t that Microsoft?
“I do not think that we take the Apple-IBM tie-up terribly seriously. I think it just made a good press release,” John Swainson, who heads Dell’s global software business, said in an interview with Reuters in Toronto on Thursday.”
Apple usually announces – fait accompli- not press releases.
Press releases are what Dell, Microsoft etc, are good at, to keep up with the competition.
Those who live by the press release die by the press release.
That is a catchy new phrase. Still, I have a hard time picturing corporate public relations execs squaring off for a duel, wielding rolled-up press releases. Dull stuff indeed. Best those flaccid wordsmiths take up broadswords — they make for more exciting duels, with more satisfying outcomes.
I like their strategy…I like it a lot.
Is Dell still in business. Oops, just saw a full page advert for Dell in Honolulu Star Advertiser newspaper advertising Celeron PC for $249 and 15 inch Celeron laptop for $249. I though Celerons went out in 1999. At any rate, with these prices, Dell will soon be out of business. Must be manufactured by slave labor in North Korea.
You could ask what else could they say? But seriously, that’s about as weak and pathetic of a response as I could imagine anyone in their positions making. There’s another data point in the why-they’re-dying story.
“PC maker Dell and smartphone maker BlackBerry are in the midst of reshaping their companies…” And why is it they are reshaping their companies?????????
1. Well what do you expect them to say? “We’re shaking in our boots? We might as well give up and sell our companies for scrap?” How would that go over at the shareholder meetings?
2. And to inject some factual information, Dell is actually doing great ever since Michael Dell bought the company back, privatized it and scaled it back.
And didn’t both Dell and Blackberry, when they saw the iPhone, not think too much of that either?
I don’t know about Dell, but while outwardly scoffing, internally RIMM was panicking that “Apple put a whole computer in there!”. RIMM knew what they were up against and knew they were in serious trouble.
Internally, Sure. But on the outside they wear a brave face.
What would you have done? Ballmer was the only one who could get away with dripping pit stains and not strike terror in the hearts of stockholders. RIMM put on a brave face, put out a few silly products and they’re now bravely circling the drain.
In business you don’t show fear. Even if your engineers are spending far more time on the toilet and drinking more Pepto-Bismol than coffee.
What I would have done was to either have something to back up my smack talk, or done something about it.
It’s all well and good to talk tough–in business or otherwise–but at the end of the day you have to be able to back it up.
Because what you’re implying is that it’s OK to talk crap, just to have your ass handed to you when the going gets rough.
And speaking of shareholders, how are they feeling now? Pretty stupid, I suspect.
Now, imagine if Blackberry had acknowledged that Apple had something really interested with the iPhone, while doing their best to beat it in the marketplace.
The end result may be the same, but at least peole wouldn’t mock Blackberry and their efforts so ruthlessly.
You talk as if you think the company is going to survive, then internally do what you think is necessary to make that happen. No one can predict the future and RIMM made, in hindsight, some spectacularly bad decisions that left them in their current dire straits. They might have possibly made some good decisions that might have left them in a better position, but for whatever reasons they didn’t.
I’m not defending RIMM nor predicting a prosperous future for them, I’m just pointing out that they were unprepared for their small business niche to turn into a consumer craze and were utterly overwhelmed by the paradigm shift. Remember, they didn’t just sell phones, they also sold security, and that security depended on their particular combination of OS and hardware. Their two pronged approach didn’t leave them amenable to a switch to Android as other manufacturers were.
If RIMM threw up their hands without even trying, that would have caused their stock to plummet like a rock and the shareholders would have been screwed more quickly.
The company has made, and continues to make decisions worthy of serious derision. They laid off most of the people necessary to keep their hardware business competitive yet continue to make phones, possibly only to fund what may turn out to be their only viable business, mobile device management and security services, and who knows, they might actually survive (not that I’ll be investing in them anytime soon).