Blasphemy & Heresy

[Pastormac1usa]

Everybody has an opinion on Apple's pile of cash as to R & D or maybe a huge M & A deal. I'm thinking along the lines of the latter. What have we heard in recent years? Tesla. Adobe (been hearing this proposed for yrs). A game publisher. A media company. Lots of possibilities.

But consider who doesn't get pitched as an acquisition target. But before we go there, what are the real weaknesses that Apple really could use to shore themselves up? To me, a glaring weakness is in cloud infrastructure and software. Can anyone truly defend the free 5 GB limit in iCloud? How many use the productivity apps vs Office 365? Microsoft gives you 1 TB of storage w/ a 365 subscription. Have we not heard how iTunes & Mail desperately need some form of complete overhaul? Both Microsoft's Azure & Amazon's AWS & Oracle have truly transformed their respective parents. Larry Ellison was so far ahead of the game in the late '90s w/ his simple net computer which foreshadowed the cloud and his acquisition of Sun gave the horsepower to make it work.

Another question: Does Satya Nadella truly care about Windows? He cares about Office as the lever into Azure but does he care about the desktop like Gates or Ballmer did? It seems Azure is the real focus now via any avenue. But also is not Outlook/Exchange the now default email client/MTA? Even if you go into an Apple Store, the Microsoft Office suite is loaded alongside Apple's own productivity apps. I'd be interested in knowing if Apple actually is running Exchange for their corporate email. Sendmail or procmail as a MTA? Doubtful.

Would Tim & Satya sit down and create some form of strategic alliance? Or, could Tim & Satya sit down together given anti-trust considerations? Apple gains access to critical cloud infrastructure & productivity software apps and Microsoft gains access to tightly integrated hardware & software. Merge the OS codebase since we're all using essentially the same chips (for now; A series still looms in the future in Macs) and becomes a single competitor to Linux.

Heresy?

 

[OLDCODGER]

More like sabotage.

 

[belvdr]

I think this horse has been beaten to death before in various "Apple should buy <something>" threads.

 

[Pastormac1usa]

I certainly agree the "Apple Should Buy <something>" threads have been intriguing. That said, is the premise valid that Apple is profoundly weak right now in cloud services for their user base? There is an alliance right now w/ IBM but how is that playing out? Who's responsible for iCloud? Eddy Cue? Like I said, 5 gb is a joke. Mail desperately needs an overhaul. Productivity apps need work. And all most people expect out of WWDC is hardware announcements or a iOS VM in MacOS and vice versa. Something is missing.

 

[NoBoMac]

I'm going with sabotage as well.

There is no reason for either side to pair up.

Apple is doing just fine on their own. Technorati on discussion boards seem to be the only ones in a snit about one thing or another (read: average Joe/Jane keep buying product and services).

MS is doing well on their own.

Merge OSes? Ugh! Two completely different design philosophies, would be a monumental task to get into one code base, and who loses out? Can see the Windows camp getting in a snit when their 32-bit apps will no longer be supported, programs from Win 7 no longer supported, etc.

MS already has access to Mac/iOS: they have Office, Exchange, One Drive apps for both. Why would MS want to merge?

And Exchange: that is not the be-all, end-all mail server out there. Plenty of big companies that run non-Exchange environments. And would not be surprised that Apple has their own internal environment or running something that is a fancy 3rd party sendmail-ish server.

And tying to to above paragraph and cloud infrastructure, Apple is already leveraging others' clouds. Seem to recall reading that a good chunk of Apple is on Amazon. And from the screen shot attached, iCloud mail is talking to Oracle out-of-the gate (header from an email sent via iCloud). And even then, everyone major cloud player has apps for OSX/iOS, so again, Apple does not have to do anything to "leverage" these environments for customers.

ADD: per the message header, iCloud mail, and probably Apple internal, is running the old Sun Messaging Server software. I have used that in the past. Gets the job done, has a web client, standards based.