One of the acts of prestidigitation that the pundit has to master is to come up with instant and convincing analysis and rationalisation of any eventuality, however unlikely. We now assume that the perpetrator of the tall tale that IBM was negotiating a recommended bid for Apple Computer Inc (CI No 1,583) was nothing but a wicked tease, but what would be the case the pundits would come up with for such an acquisition? From IBM’s point of view, apart from the desirable end of denying the prize to DEC, it would reverse IBM’s biggest disaster of the 1980s, its decision to make the Personal Computer open with an operating system it did not own: while regarded as an industry standard, the Macintosh environment belongs code, load and barrel-shifter to Apple – and migrating the software to the RS/6000 RISC processor would make the whole thing even more proprietary. IBM’s OS/2 and Micro Channel strategies are in disarray, Microsoft Corp is becoming insufferably uppity with its hard sell for Windows 3.0 the last straw, and the Macintosh System is an incomparably leaner, meaner operating system than OS/2. How justify the move to IBM users – after all the PS/2 and OS/2 wouldn’t simply go away? As IBM always does when it introduces directly competing products, it would smile benignly and say it is simply offering the user more choice. There is little doubt that IBM really believed that it would be a hundred billion dollar company by now, and the fact that it has fallen so far short must hurt – and IBM must realise that the only way to do it in reasonable time now has to be by acquisition. IBM may also regard the US educational market as even more important than anyone had assumed: with Apple as well, it would well nigh own it outright. Why should Apple want to be acquired? Now that it has recognised that it must mix it with the clonemakers in the gutter with the Macintosh Classic, it knows that its margins are unlikely ever to be so good again, and if John Sculley is much more perceptive than all those computer veterans that never understood what open systems would do to their proprietary business until it was too late, he may fear that five years out, the Macintosh environment may well look a lot less of an asset than it does today. And there is still no clear successor to John Akers as IBM’s helmsman…