This makes me worried for Apple. IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services, and Watson in particular has seemed to be a pretty mediocre product with heavy marketing and gimmicks (Jeopardy and H&R Block come to mind).
Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
> Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone else on how to run a cloud service.
Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows, would you pay to use any of their services?
I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple services.
I think you're missing the point of Apple's cloud services.
They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.
I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.
I agree completely that Apple’s cloud services aren’t very compelling right now. I’m just worried that they are trying to use IBM’s cloud instead of building out their own capabilities.
If they are going to improve integration with third party services, I would love to have better integration with Google’s services, not IBM’s..
This isn't outsourcing, it is advertising. Apple and IBM have complimentary services that they've just made easier to integrate.
There is a vacuum in the Enterprise from when Blackberry was the go-to device. This smells of an in-road Apple might be taking to make itself the defacto Mobile Device for Enterprise.
IBM benefits from this by being able to market Watson services easier to App makers.
> Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?
You use things developed by IBM daily without even knowing it. Barcodes, credit cards, RAM, hard drives, modern microprocessors, airline travel, laser eye surgery, and even relational databases are all possible thanks to advances by IBM. Almost all nanotechnology research utilizes scanning tunneling microscopy which was invented IBM.
IBM Research is usually bleeding edge technology. They work on technology decades before it becomes mainstream. Currently they're doing research in things like High temperature superconductivity, Quantum Computing, and Nanotechnology.
IBM also develops solutions for the financial services industry and are working on Blockchain technologies for the banking system. They're doing advanced AI research. They have healthcare and geo-spatial initiatives as well.
It would make sense . They want to grow their services division so why not branch out to ML?
IBM has been struggling retaining people and their cloud efforts have been at best a distant fourth (AWS, AZURE and GCE). I tried using it and it had no advantage . At least Microsoft has a nice windows integration and UX and google has good UX and integration into Google services. AWS is the incumbent and what I personally use since I don’t trust Google and Azure doesn’t appeal to me due to my lack of need of Windows.
>Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.
Apple doesn't outsource their Cloud services to IBM. This story is not about that at all.
(They do use Azure and Google Cloud though, and perhaps Amazon too).
>IBM is not a company that comes to mind when I think of cutting edge cloud services
"Cloud services" is a pretty nebulous term. When it comes to ML cloud services I don't think there are any clear leaders. AWS services don't really compare to this.
Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.