Apple, IBM and Microsoft in a war of signs Visual and narrative analysis of three brands of the IT market By Francesco Mangiapane Phd attendant in Industrial Design, University of Palermo Italy The aim of my paper is exploring how image contributes on building the brand identity of specific organisations and how the meaning of the image can be resignified by the action of the players in a specific market. In particular, I will focus on the competition between three brands, Ibm, Apple, Microsoft. on the information technology market. My work is looking forward to be a continuation of the essay “Le vie du Logo” published in “Identités visuelles” by Jean Marie Floch about the visual competition between Apple and Ibm. I will use the tools of sociosemiotics, plastic and figurative analysis, screening more than 20 years of competition starting from 1984, the year in which the analysis of Jean Marie Floch ends up. We left Apple in a winner position towards IBM thanks to its ability of inverting the visual traits of the Big Blue in the famous commercial 1984, analysed in the essay “Identités visuelles” by Jean Marie Floch. A long time has passed since that incredibly innovative period of the information technology history, so long to make us think something in the identities of both competing corporations must have been surely changed according to the theoretical remark that visual identity is something to be valued with regards to the time, to its passing. The first huge change is that, at this point, Apple and Ibm are not in a direct competition anymore: while Apple remained in the hardware market (with he transformations we will analyse), IBM has abandoned the field, selling its hardware division to the Chinese firm Lenovo. In the meanwhile, as a really powerful earthquake, Microsoft joins the competition, first as a software house involved in the development of applications for the Apple Computers (the famous Word and Excel, were natively written for Mac Os!) and then as a direct competitor in the rising market of the graphic interface operating systems: Macintosh computers were the first ones to implement this feature which has been the killer application of Windows operating system a year later. Microsoft Earthquake The entrance in a grand style of Microsoft in the competition will determine a real overturning of the balances in the market, bringing the two giants of Information Technology market (IBM and APPLE) in a serious difficulty which would have driven both of them to certain failing without a clear turnabout. In the nineties, the market of operating systems sees Apple to fall into marginal market shares against more than 90% of them detained by Microsoft. Noticing that the visual identity of Microsoft has been built in relation to both the identities of Apple and IBM, already starting from the Windows operating system logo, which has always been the firm’s vexillum, may be of some interest.