Tim Cook on Apple and Microsoft partnership: ‘It’s what customers want’

Cook spoke today with Box CEO Aaron Levie during the BoxWorks conference in San Francisco, highlighting the iPhone maker’s focus on serving companies as well as it serves the average consumer.

Cook admitted that Apple wasn’t in the business of trying to be the end all, be all for everyone. “So this is not a hobby”, he added.

Research published in June by the bipartisan advocacy group First Focus found that the U.S. government has consistently decreased spending on education, falling from 1.27% of overall spending in 2011 to just over 1% in 2015. But the hardware division has gone away. Companies want to partner with other companies that are part of an ecosystem, not on an island by themselves. “You don’t get an enterprise pen to write with”. Despite their increased willingness to partner on the enterprise and cloud world, they are clearly still competitors with different views on what the consumer wants. “You want to deal with somebody who works with the major players in the industry”.

“We don’t have an iPlane”, said Cook. “The best companies will be the most mobile”. Instead of lining up, customers can check out with any Apple Store employee thanks to an iPhone-based checkout system. “We don’t believe in having one operating system for desktop and mobile – we think it subtracts from both and you don’t get the best experience”, he said referencing Android, Google’ ubiquitous operating system. Apple also partnered with Cisco recently to gain a better foothold in the business realm. Cook heavily pushed Apple’s strategy of expanding their products to businesses, saying Apple, which now has a market capitalisation of $631bn, needed partnerships with IBM, Cisco and Box to diversify into specialist business markets, such as financial services. The company sold a record 13 million iPhones, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the companys California headquarters, and Cook sat at the head table at a state dinner President Barack Obama hosted for China President Xi Jinping. “I look at all this, and I think, gosh, we haven’t even started yet”.

Turning to partnerships, Levie and Cook discuss how Apple is working with former rivals like IBM and Microsoft to deliver better solutions for customers, something that will definitely benefit enterprise. Cook also points to public education and the environment as areas of emphasis. “We don’t have deep knowledge”, he said of enterprise software. “So we have no intention to blend them”. The company and IBM previous year unveiled plans to work together to push Apple’s products with business users. In the talk, Cook said that in the past year, Apple has generated $25 billion in enterprise business. “Partnering with Microsoft is great for our customers and that’s why we do it”.