First Take: Tech's odd couple have common interests

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Steve Jobs would have spit his Evian water in shock.

Apple and IBM, the company Apple vilified in the infamous 1984 Big Brother ad during the Super Bowl, are partnering.

Jobs, a legendary lone wolf, believed in proprietary technology, and Apple shunned partnerships with its tech brethren – save for a couple of joint ventures with IBM in the 1990s. Anyone remember Taligent and Kaleida Labs? (Apple, IBM and Motorola teamed up on PowerPC, computer chips and an operating system for the Macintosh computer in 1991.)

Tech's odd couple are opposites with a lot in common — for their current and future financial good.

Why now? Twenty years later, Apple and IBM are two very different companies, occupying different spaces in the market and rarely competing. Apple got into smartphones and tablets, IBM into enterprise computing, health care and security. Apple and IBM plan to create business apps for mobile devices.

Within a year, about 70% of workers on IBM-supported networks are expected to have iPhone- and iPad-friendly apps up and running, tech analyst Richard Doherty says.

Then there is the résumé of Apple CEO Tim Cook. He spent more than a decade at IBM, where he ended up North American fulfillment director for IBM's personal computer company in the Americas. In this case, familiarity bred cooperation.

Indeed, Apple-IBM is much more than a strategic alliance. It is a symbolic pairing that may be a precursor to products beyond apps and a softening of the Apple only-invented-here culture.

More important, it symbolically establishes Cook as Apple's unquestioned leader. Recent executive defections had some wondering if Cook was long for the job. This is his forceful way of saying yes.

Although Jobs would have probably scoffed at such a corporate arrangement of "frenemies," he also may have planted the seeds himself.

It was Jobs, after all, who famously told Cook, "Never ask what (I) would do. Just do what's right."