The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI.
I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it.
However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings. Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data.
Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he's nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs.
It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple's secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.
> However it's tough to beat Google in this space...they also have a lot of data on users...
Agreed, the amount of data is key. This is where Apple will struggle when looking to upgrade Siri/AI capabilities in coming years.
> Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot
Privacy and security (and, secondarily, a full physical keyboard) was Blackberry's key differentiator before they lost to the touchscreen-enabled iPhone app ecosystem.
Now that competitor's offerings are becoming more powerful (hardware) and refined (software), and the smartphone market is close to saturation in advanced economies, Apple needs a non-technical differentiator. Security/privacy is the perfect talking point.
I have no reason to believe that Tim Cook is acting in the interest of users ("a man with principles") while marketing Apple products as private and secure; rather, he is acting in the interest of shareholders, as he should be given that he is the CEO of a public company. Happily, user and shareholder interests seem to be mostly aligned at the moment - Apple can sell more phones if people trust the brand.
If it makes more financial sense in the future to ditch user privacy (in order to get closer with Facebook & Microsoft so as to compete with Google), he probably will. But don't expect to hear an announcement about it until the info is leaked. It's impossible to truly discern the character of a public company's CEO because they are always acting, and tons of things happen within their organizations without their knowledge.
I disagree. Apple's stance on privacy has everything to do with the personality and life experiences of Tim Cook.
Stop for a moment to imagine what being a homosexual teenager in 1970's Alabama was like. Also it's well known that his career at IBM was torpedoed over a gay "glass ceiling."
Tim Cook is a man who understands that privacy is a human right.
>I disagree. Apple's stance on privacy has everything to do with the personality and life experiences of Tim Cook.
Stop focusing on feelings and personality.
It would be a violation of his role as Chief to lead the business on purely emotional grounds, making decisions based on his experiences growing up.
He has an obligation to return value to his shareholders.
Privacy is a Business Moat[1] for Apple, it's something they can offer to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and frankly: nothing more.
It's a clever moat because Google's moat is the actual opposite. Google says we will take your private data, reorganize it and return it to you in more useful ways. This is a powerful moat because consumers demonstrate that they like the convenience of Google's features.
Apple chose the exact opposite moat: we will respect your privacy and not run advanced intelligence against the dataset of you. It's clever because it turns a disadvantage (Google is waaaaay better at it) into an advantage (Not doing it is a good thing).
You can rationalize the calculus with feelings but that doesn't change the fact that Apple isn't a business run on emotions it's run on rational decisions, like market differentiation to create a perception of value.
I hate this argument that companies are completely void of all emotion. You could just as easily say that no one cares about privacy and that taking a stand is a bad financial decision. Given the amount of bad press Apple got for their stand against the FBI, that doesn't seem like a very difficult argument to make.
So given that it's not very hard to make the arguments that standing up for privacy might be or might not be a good financial decision, why would you think the decision Tim Cook chose had absolutely nothing to do with his life experiences?
""When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader."
It's a completely legitimate argument actually. If ever his personal agenda lead him into conflict with the interest of shareholders in a fashion that was detrimental to Apple's profits, the board would remove him. Simple as that.
There's a difference between a decision being made for a moral/ethical reason that happens to be in line with shareholders and a decision being made only to appease shareholders. Given how hard it is to determine if any one decision is truly good for the short/long-term health of the business, it seems silly to say that the first case never happens.
I used to think exactly like you until recently. Something happened that changed my thinking completely: I come into a position of power, and I was actually inclined to push my personal believes "policy". There was no personal benefits. Maybe not much benefits for the counter-party I was acting for.
I used to think people act completely on self-interest. Well, they do run daily for self-interest but you'll be surprised how much they want to push their "policies"/"believes". And some of them do go really long extra miles and put huge efforts.
Now, Tim Cook might be in for financial reasons. But I'll be surprised if his experiences didn't affect his decision making a LOT.
Maybe. I don't know Tim Cook personally, so I'm in no position to judge his character. I'd like to believe his case for privacy is a moral one, grounded in his own challenging personal experiences. That would certainly be refreshing.
What I do know for a fact is that he is the CEO of a public company, and as such he has a duty to maximize shareholder value. This isn't a judgement of his character, it's simply a description of his job. I believe he is very capable of performing his job.
You can maximize shareholder value by aligning your company to make money while doing the right thing. There's plenty of salable arguments that a CEO can make about the benefits of not acting like a cutthroat psychopath business - just because CEOs like Trump loudly and proudly flout their ability and willingness to fuck over anyone they can in the pursuit of more wealth doesn't mean he will actually succeed.
Building loyalty with both customers and employees is not something that shows up on the balance sheet every quarter, but when you have the loyalty you can do a lot more things than someone who doesn't. I'm planning to buy a macbook pro this thursday at well over $1000 over the price for similar hardware by ASUS/Acer/Lenovo etc because of the perception that Apple has the consumer in mind.
There are many, many ways to maximize shareholder value. Or at least try to. No path is without risk.
He could focus on privacy and discover that for most people it's not a big deal. Or some kind of WikiLeaks/NSA scandal could happen and people decide it's a very big deal. (Oftentime timing is everything. DoubleClick lost a third of its value because of controversies about cookies, but 10 years later Facebook went far, far, far beyond DoubleClick and their market value went up.)
He could decide that price is the most important thing and move all their operations offshore. A recession might come and it turns out low cost is the way to go. Or the economy might boom and people spend money like it's 1999.
Apple has had a pretty golden touch over the last 15-20 years, and it's hard to argue with success. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Microsoft stomped Apple and everyone else for 20 years, then went sideways for 10+ (as measured by stock market performance). But it's not like they decided to stop trying to maximize shareholder value. They just had difficulties figuring out how.
> Privacy and security (and, secondarily, a full physical keyboard) was Blackberry's key differentiator before they lost to the touchscreen-enabled iPhone app ecosystem.
Was it? Blackberry often co-operated to provide governments with access to BBM message content[1][2].
Both of your sources (2010, 2013) don't apply to Blackberry pre iPhone (2007). Even so, I'm speaking to brand perception rather than reality - BB may might have given out keys/built in backdoors pre 2007 and still maintained the perception of being trustworthy.
Amazon's recommendation engine more or less falls under the umbrella of AI, it's just not one that consumers are really even aware they are interacting with.
Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share.
The talk that Microsoft is irrelevant is a bit hilarious, given that they beat google on revenue and income last year. They have morphed from a company that is front and center to one that provides the infrastructure for the digital side of non-tech business. Microsoft Office is absolutely pervasive, and it's not going anywhere.
It's all based on Morgan Stanley’s "2016 CIO Survey". It doesn't appear to be publicly available.
I've been the drone filling out surveys like this for CIOs in the past. Sometimes those surveys ask these sorts of things indirectly, especially if it's a paid survey. For example, they might assume that O365 utilization drives Azure adoption. (Behind the scenes O365 auth is an Azure service) Another example would be asking if your org has MSDN or an EA. In both cases, that provides some "free"/NFR Azure services.
A few years ago, Gartner pushed a survey like this where 40% of a group of drunken CIO types at some conference claimed that they wouldn't buy PCs or smartphones for employees after 2018. This stuff just isn't that meaningful.
That was where I saw it. It seems the market is balancing, rather than AWS pulling away, with YoY growth better for Google than for Microsoft and both better than Amazon:
The author called out, specifically, how Azure was in his opinion keeping Microsoft relevant
"Nadella got Microsoft organized around mobile and the cloud (Azure), freed the Office and Azure teams from Windows, killed the phone business and got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma. And is moving the company into augmented reality and conversational AI. While they’ll likely never regain the market dominance they had in the 20th century, (their business model continues to be extremely profitable) Nadella likely saved Microsoft from irrelevance."
Windows 7 was a 'tock' release to Vista's 'tick', so I can see why the author would not consider it major.
Then again, Windows 10 was also probably a 'tock' release to Windows 8's tick (considering 8.1 was essentially a service pack).
While all this is true, it is also true that this trajectory looks a lot like IBM's after their heyday. It might just be a somewhat more gradual slide down to irrelevance.
For example, I couldn't actually figure out if Tay.AI was an example of supreme idiocy or supreme hubris. Their repeated botching of Windows 10 auto-updates is not getting much attention because the profits have moved towards the cloud, but that it all the more telling considering that MS had quite a monopoly on the personal computing device market not long back.
Remember, it wasn't like they were caught by surprise at some of these innovations - they did start something called Windows Live Search way back when, they did have some of the world's first smartphones (except they were put together in a way that no one wanted to use), they also had the advantage of large piles of cash to use to acquire, say, a YouTube. After they finally ran out of options, they decide to jump on the open source bandwagon because otherwise there was a very realistic chance that they would have actually gone into a serious downward spiral, particularly in the currency that matters most for tech companies - the mindshare of software developers who actually wish to push the bleeding edge farther.
It might seem ironic that, given the majority of Ballmer's tenure was spent not just bad mouthing open source, but actively harassing the open source community [1], that the first thing that Ballmer's exit brought was a sudden embrace of open source. In reality though, their chameleon like stance towards open source - embracing it when it suits them while kicking it when it doesn't - was effectively the only possibility for MS to regain its reputation. After all, it is not as if they innovated their way out of that hole. The general contempt directed at MSFT is well earned by this point, and while they are supposedly trying very hard to make amends, one also wonders if the world might already have good Linux desktops by this time if not for Microsoft's active nuisance-making for most of the previous decade. Yes, the companies are merely trying to maximize shareholder profits, but there are lots of times when MS did things which were just cringe-worthy. See this gem from Bill Gates [2]:
"In the same leaked Microsoft internal 'Challenges and Strategy' memo, Gates outlined a solution to the problem: "patenting as much as we can. A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." By 2004 Microsoft was accumulating 3000 patents a year."
And not to mention, the companies which ate away at Microsoft's profits actually came up with genuinely innovative stuff - even today, Bing is no match for Google's search - despite the fact that MS once used to pay people to use Bing (Bing Rewards)? What is MS doing which is similarly innovative? At least with regards to this article, yes, Microsoft is just another software company today which is making a set of the most expedient choices towards profitability.
> "In the same leaked Microsoft internal 'Challenges and Strategy' memo, Gates outlined a solution to the problem: "patenting as much as we can. A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
The opportunity costs this guy and his company added to the whole of society through the 1990s and early 2000s are huge, hope he'll finally reach some form of repentance at some point. Maybe what he and his wife are now in doing in Africa will help him in that regard.
Azure has 10% marketshare. AWS has 30% marketshare. People who aren't on the frontlines of enterprise wheeling and dealing can't see this but for those who are, it is fairly clear that Azure is out for blood AWS's blood.
I think Apple is making a mistake by taking the privacy first approach. I strongly believe people will be trading privacy for convenience and companies which shamelessly mine the customer data will win.
This could also affect recruiting, since I assume it is more interesting to be working with AI projects in company like Facebook or Google where you have access to was amounts of customer information.
As time moves on, customers get more aware of the privacy implications of everything they do online. I think Apple is ahead of the pack.
Google cannot follow them because it's against their business interest.
I know plenty of people who do not trust Google and stay away from their products (including Android phones) as much as is feasible.
The cost for Privacy is pretty big in terms of loss of convenience.
If people really cared about it duckduckgo would be huge and gmail would have never gotten off the ground. Facebook would be a desert. Most people feel comfortable sharing and being a mostly open book. Only real privacy people care about is who gets to unlock their phone.
Most people are lost in that their privacy is they are one flake in a snowstorm.
I seriously had friends for year say "Don't put my kids on the internet." After a few years that all goes away due to the ease of sharing life with friends and families.
So when people who own iPhone see Amazon's Alexia and their horrible Siri they buy the Echo from Amazon.
Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy.
Siri being complete crap has nothing to do with privacy, in fact the original iteration of Siri sent everything to the cloud for processing. I honestly don't know how the meme got started that privacy, out of all things, is hurting Siri.
Siri cannot even remember the subject of the last question. It cannot answer meaningful questions about anything on the internet. Its knowledge of "places of interest" is terrible because Apple's database is years behind Google's. I've given up on "Hey Siri" because it just doesn't work.
If Siri is almost useless when it comes to publicly accessible information, then how would it help to give it centralised access to private information?
(Or the other way around: If Siri worked well, but was limited to publicly available information, it would still be freaking awesome. But I have my doubts about the current iteration of AI.)
> I strongly believe people will be trading privacy for convenience and companies which shamelessly mine the customer data will win.
I do agree there should be a way to trade privacy for services. Some things can be a lot better when they're personalized.
I'd like to see more granularity and control over the transaction, so it's more of a personal data exchange rather than privacy. Right now it seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Privacy first means we can have control over what data is shared. You can still choose to share what you want. That makes it much more of a trade. Right now I don't feel like I'm trading. Right now I feel more like I need to actively guard against people reaching into my "privacy" wallet while I happen to be using services they're offering.
Don't get me wrong: I'm using the services they're providing, and they should be getting something in return. Using Gmail as an example, people think of it as "free email". They're not necessarily aware of the nature -- or extent-- of the exchange. I'm certainly not. I have no idea the extent to which Google is using my data. It doesn't even need to be nefarious. All I'm saying is that I'd like the exchange to be more explicit.
So far we haven't figured out ways of making these kinds of exchanges easy. And I'd much rather see these exchanges happen in the market rather than solely rely on regulations to protect privacy.
I'm sure others have varying opinions on this. If you have an alternate take, please share a comment or a link. Thanks!
I want so desperately to disagree with you but when I think about the average person today, I just don't see them fighting against privacy invasions. They are too brainwashed by the terrorism drum bangers.
> It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS.
Google and Apple have beaten Microsoft at Windows, by offering better options in MacOS, iOS, and Android. Microsoft is trying (and to some extent succeeding) in catching up to AWS with Azure (look who is growing faster). And if you don't think that dominating the mp3 player market, which allowed for the launch of iTunes, directly leading to the iPhone and the App Store, was important, you didn't pay attention closely.
Also, since the iPhone literally created a market and Android took about 2 years to really launch a competitor, it's pretty flawed to argue that they never beat anyone in market share.
> I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them
Alexa is easily the best voice assistant, at least in terms of actually understanding what is being asked. When it can't help, it's far more often because it can't find a result or because Amazon/the app builder hasn't built Alexa into the product yet (still drives me crazy that asking Alexa to play an HBO show only works with HBO Go, but not HBA Now, for example, but Alexa definitely understands the requests).
I don't know if Alexa is the "best" voice assistant, but up until Google Home ships (has it yet?) it's the "only" voice assistant in the place that voice assistants actually matter.
It'll be interesting to see if Google overtakes the Echo. I'm not a fan of Google's "no apps" approach.
I think the point about Alexa's great interactivity coming from having to build for a device with no screen is a strong one. Though I think that the best AI-driven UIs in the future will have to bridge the gap and be able to display content usefully on a screen (or many screens), while also preserving that concept of knowing what the current context is (i.e. "skip" means "skip the track" if I have music playing, but might refer to a different app if I have youtube running).
I agree, I don't know if it's the best. I just know that it recognizes the words I say to it better than any other I have used, oftentimes without needing to speak in the artificially clear voice that most tend to associate with voice control.
> He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs.
Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.
You can interpret public stances of principle as various ways of making money in the long term, but I do buy that Tim Cook cares about doing the right thing in some areas.
> (An) NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable.
What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
If I wasn't aware enough about the US political landspace, reading that I'd be convinced that the NCPPR representative could only be a bad plot by Apple for PR. I mean, "commit to doing only those things that were profitable"? It's like asking if he plans to add "Darth" to his name.
Well, if you're going to apply Occam's Razor, given that as a matter of fact most people don't give a shit about security or privacy, it's actually not in Apple's best interest to make this stand, at least when speaking short term, as it is negating them future revenue opportunities.
And they aren't doing it only in their press releases, but in their products as well. I'd enumerate features of iOS or OS X that have been very well thought out in this regard, but that would make for a blog post.
Occam's Razor actually tells you to take him at his word, as that is the simplest explanation. A major part of Occam's Razor is to eliminate the "read between the lines" gyrations that you're engaging in.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's a misapplication of the principle.
It seems to me the comparison being made between Ballmer and Cook is not in their characters, but in similarities between the directions their companies take under a comparable set of circumstances.
Do we really know the content of people's characters based solely on what we hear in tech blogs and popular media? Was superior security/privacy/whatever not a selling point for Apple since "lol Mac's don't get viruses"?
I'm not saying Tim Cook is bad, I'm just saying how do we know billionaire execs with PR teams and heavy financial incentives to seem good are in fact good? Did this not bite people in the ass with Holmes?
> Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data.
This is a tech industry shibboleth. Internet search is not particularly good for anyone, and it was better for power users when it wasn't much more than web-grep. Google's innovation was to count the links pointing to a page in order to determine its quality, and once Google became dominant, that technique had been gamed enough to be virtually useless. As far as I can tell, the only algorithmic improvements they've had since then have been net negatives for one's ability to search for things that they haven't searched for before, and the only effective improvements have been from manual tweaking to weed out content farms. Every search I make on Google brings up the same 80 companies that choose to spend most of their effort on SEO, but actually have a business (usually selling me something) rather than copying low-quality content. Google's image search has aggressively gotten materially worse. They've gotten so desperate for improvements that they've been systematically dismantling ethical barriers in order to squeeze out a few more dollars.
I have no idea what product establishes Google as significantly ahead of anyone in AI. They're all just a day ahead of some mathematician who has a sudden insight over her first coffee of the morning. In this, Tim Cook isn't missing anything other than a slight increase in the probability that that mathematician will be working at Apple that morning rather at than the University of Arkansas.
This is the truly hard thing with disruptive innovation.
It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.
We'll see. Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too.
Apple can provide most of the consumer services on the devices without external services. There's a risk that they cannot execute, but there's a real risk to the Google approach too -- swaths of the business can be wiped out by regulatory action.
> Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too.
Yes, I apologize if I wasn't clear. My point was that it's hard to see what is disruptive technology and what is nothing. Plenty of things labelled as disruptive end up as nothing. Plenty of things labelled as nothing end up as disruptive.
I was just saying it's never easy to tell which is which.
I'm a big fan of using machine learning to identify photos, etc. Google did it first on their cloud platform, and Apple is doing a pretty good job at it locally on iOS devices.
I'm not a big fan of folks like the Watson marketing team telling me that my IoT fridge is going to replace my doctor and order a gallon of milk for me when I need it. As the Amazon experience with the dash has aptly demonstrated with paper towels that cost 30% more than Costco, that's a way to spend more money on junk!
Do they get access to info on how you're using AWS? As in, could they be learning about the perfect stack, hardware/VM optimisations and technologies used in order to jump into the market with a broad knowledge of the current state of the art?
Edit: I guess they don't get any information on success measures, but still, would be interesting if metadata would help them hit the ground running.
Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products (in the blue ocean sense) as seem to be defined in the article. This is the complaint the article makes with "execution" executives. As products they're all mechanisms for increasing revenues on existing (re: stagnant) products instead of creating completely new product lines that reflect the changes in the market.
Not in the slightest. The iPhone's UI was far superior, as was its hardware.
What's special about the Mac Pro other than its case design? And what would change in how the Mac Pro functions if its guts were instead in the old Mac Pro case?
All of the guts are just an Intel processor, AMD video cards, etc. There isn't some custom magical chip in there.
For starters, there is the core that acts like a heatsink. Then there is also the smaller profile. I don't know if you've seen the previous Mac Pros, but they were huge.
Also your argument does not add up! Are you saying it is not great because the components are off the shelf? Going by that logic, all the modern cars have the same IC engine. The Mac Pro clearly has more capable hardware, why is that not enough? why does it have to be a magic chip?
My original statement was that the Mac Pro was a fancy computer case, nothing more. You state:
> "For starters, there is the core that acts like a heatsink. Then there is also the smaller profile."
Which is exactly my point.
> "The Mac Pro clearly has more capable hardware, why is that not enough?"
In what way? Seriously. You said it was "off the shelf" components and then it somehow has more capable hardware? How does that work? Because it has a unique cooling mechanism?
Which is what? It was not just the case, the guts are also different. I never claimed they are unique, but they surely are different. You can downvote me all you want, but saying the current Mac Pro is iteration/just a case and not a different product is wrong.
>In what way? Seriously. You said it was "off the shelf" components and then it somehow has more capable hardware? How does that work? Because it has a unique cooling mechanism?
I know I've said this before, but if you go to http://apple.com/mac-pro/, you can clearly see how it is more capable compared to older generation.
>the guts are also different. I never claimed they are unique, but they surely are different.
Just because they're different doesn't automatically mean that they're better.
>I know I've said this before, but if you go to http://apple.com/mac-pro/, you can clearly see how it is more capable compared to older generation.
What's the point of comparing with the older generation? The technology has advanced, of course it'll be more capable. Unless the user needs to stay in the Apple ecosystem, the Mac pro should be competing with the PCs of the "current" generation.
You and the original commentor both seem to be missing my point. All I said was it is a defferent product, that is more capable than the previous generation. I never said it is the best or that it is unique in any way.
The 2013 Mac pro was a very powerful Mac Mini with lots of terrible design choices. So many pros hated it and Apple hasn't bothered to upgrade it in 3 years.
The Watch and Pencil are accessories, like the AirPods.
> These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products
Some much more than others. If you apply this logic consistently, the only new products Steve Jobs introduced were the original Apple (II), the Mac operating systems, the iPod and iOS. Everything else was an iteration, right?
These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization
Alexa is the perfect example of a product that could have been made by Apple but wasn't, and which ticks all those boxes.
And not just those. Apple's big strength isn't hardware, it's ecosystems. The hardware was always just a front end to a network of unique systems, markets, and services.
The latest Apple offerings seem to have forgotten that. Watch is primarily a shiny widget, not the thin client the iPod and iPad were. The latest Macs are heading in a similar direction. There are more services, but they're less appealing to users because the UI designs have become clunky, and there's no sense of forward momentum among many user groups.
With Alexa, Amazon has proved that it can play the consumer game too. Alexa includes links to content providers, links to hardware manufacturers, and links to other software services.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a crash R&D program to create Apple's own version of Alexa. (I would be surprised, but maybe not completely, if Siri Home appears on the 27th. I'm guessing next year is more likely and 2018 isn't impossible.)
But it may be too late. Amazon has a first mover advantage, and it can only drop the lead by allowing the platform to stagnate.
Amazon may well do that. Bezos seems to suffer from occasional new product ADHD, so he may not follow through.
But there's certainly huge potential to take Alexa much further, and if Apple is going to compete any R&D project has to aim for where Alexa could be three to five years from now, not where Alexa is today.
Which doesn't change the fact that Apple could have made Siri Home first. The hardware was always available. The only thing missing was Cook's lack of vision and drive.
It could also be that Apple doesn't see Alexa as something they need to compete with — that Siri on existing devices (and especially "Hey, Siri") addresses that niche for them.
Speaking of Metal, understanding the rationale behind keeping a non-interoperable API with other ecosystems couldn't help me from expecting a revolutionary universal low-level graphics API. I've suffered long enough in the GL madness to lose my sanity.
I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it.
However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings. Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data.
Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he's nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs.
It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple's secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.