Steve Jobs died almost three years ago, but the executive’s vision is still one of the most influential in the tech industry. At Apple, the company he founded, Jobs takes on messianic qualities. Too bad that his replacement Tim Cook is going against everything he stood for.

It’s not all that correct to put words into somebody else’s mouth, and claims of what Steve Jobs may or may not have said have been running rampant since his death in October 2011. Instead of mindless speculation, here’s a look at what Steve Jobs thought about IBM in the past, and an explanation about why it matters today.

“Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are ‘slash q-zs’ and things like that.”

Steve Jobs thought that IBM systems were too complex for users to connect to. He was right and the world moved away from the command line. IBM software hasn’t gotten much more user friendly, and if the company is in charge of that end of the partnership you can be sure to expect more of the same from the firm.

“When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money.”

Steve Jobs believed in the power of good ideas ahead of the power of cash. He thought that a good idea with a little bit of money behind it would beat out a bad idea with a lot of money backing it. He was right with the iPhone, but nothing but billions in sales and research spending is going to sell IBM software on Apple devices.

“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”

Steve Jobs thought that IBM was the kind of company that killed a market once it got ahead. Now that Apple is the one in charge of the computer industry Tim Cook is looking to side with the company in order to make sure the Cupertino company cannot be moved from its perch.

“IBM processors failed Apple once.”

Steve Jobs did in fact team up with IBM himself, back in the late 1980s. Back then Apple needed processors for its upcoming range of notebooks. The company chose the IBM PowerPC range because of IBM promises of its future ability. The PowerPC chips never matched up to Intel offerings, and Steve Jobs had to abandon the deal in order to make MacBooks compete with more powerful PCs. Steve Jobs pioneered the migration of Apple OS X away from Power PC. “The PowerPC and the Pentium are equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you measure them,” according to the former CEO.