Editing AIM alliance (section)

===Development===
{{cquote | text=Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows.<ref name="Emasculating Windows"/>}}
From the 1980s into the 1990s, the computer industry was moving from a model of just individual personal computers toward an interconnected world, where no single company could afford to be vertically isolated anymore. ''[[Infinite Loop (book)|Infinite Loop]]'' says "most people at Apple knew the company would have to enter into ventures with some of its erstwhile enemies, license its technology, or get bought".<ref name="Infinite Loop">{{cite book|author-link=Michael S. Malone|first=Michael S.|last=Malone|year=1999|title=Infinite Loop|isbn=978-0-385-48684-2|oclc=971131326|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/infiniteloophoww00malo}}</ref>{{rp|428–429}} Furthermore, [[Microsoft]]'s monopoly and the [[Wintel]] duopoly threatened competition industrywide, and the [[Advanced Computing Environment]] (ACE) consortium was underway.

[[Phillip Doyce Hester|Phil Hester]], a designer of the IBM [[IBM RS/6000|RS/6000]], convinced IBM's president [[Jack Kuehler]] of the necessity of a [[business alliance]].<ref>{{Cite news |title= In Pursuit of Computing's Holy Grail |author= Steve Lohr |work= The New York Times |date= May 23, 1993 |url= https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/23/business/in-pursuit-of-computing-s-holy-grail.html |access-date= November 13, 2016 | url-access=limited}}</ref> Kuehler called Apple President [[Michael Spindler]], who bought into the approach for a design that could challenge the [[Wintel]]-based PC. Apple CEO [[John Sculley]] was even more enthusiastic.<ref name="falters">{{Cite news |title= Computing's Bold Alliance Falters |author-link=John Markoff | first=John | last=Markoff |work= The New York Times |date= September 14, 1994 |url= https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/14/business/business-technology-computing-s-bold-alliance-falters.html |access-date= November 13, 2016 |url-access=limited}}</ref>

On July 3, 1991, Apple and IBM signed a non-contractual [[letter of intent]], proposing an alliance and outlining its long-term strategic technology goals. Its main goal was creating a single unifying open-standard computing platform for the whole industry, made of a new hardware design and a next-generation [[operating system]]. IBM intended to bring the Macintosh operating system into the enterprise and Apple intended to become a prime customer for the new POWER hardware platform. Considering it to be critically poorly communicated and confusing to the outside world at this point, industry commentators nonetheless saw this partnership as an overall competitive force against Microsoft's monopoly and Intel's and Microsoft's duopoly.<ref name="The Executive">{{cite news | newspaper=The New York Times | first=Peter H. | last=Lewis | title=The Executive Computer; What's in I.B.M.'s and Apple's Gunsights? Microsoft | date=July 14, 1991 | url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/14/business/the-executive-computer-what-s-in-ibm-s-and-apple-s-gunsights-microsoft.html | access-date=February 17, 2019 |url-access=limited}}</ref><ref name="Rivals">{{cite journal | journal=InfoWorld | title=Rivals IBM, Apple team up for open platform | date=July 8, 1991 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iVAEAAAAMBAJ&q=ibm+apple&pg=PA1 | access-date=February 18, 2019}}</ref> IBM and Motorola would have 300 engineers to codevelop chips at a joint manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. Motorola would sell the chips to Apple or anyone else.

{{blockquote | text=Executives said the negotiations were stop and go, sometimes seeming to founder and then speeding up as impasses were resolved. The main disagreements occurred when one company or the other thought it was giving away too much technology. Executives said that the technological contributions of both sides were evaluated and that money was used to balance the terms, in what negotiators referred to as the "cosmic arithmetic." But how much money is being paid, and which company is paying, is closely guarded information. | source=''[[The New York Times]]''<ref name="Main Ally"/>}}

Between the three companies, more than 400 people had been involved to define a more unified corporate culture with less top-down executive decree. They collaborated as peers and future coworkers in creating the alliance and the basis of its ongoing future dialog which promised to "change the landscape of computing in the 90s".<ref name="Main Ally"/>