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Don't Panic, But We've Passed Peak Apple (and Google, and Facebook)
waderoush writes "Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing. (Add in Amazon, if you're feeling generous.) But it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new — and there are good reasons to think they never will again. This Xconomy essay argues that the innovation engines at Google, Apple, and Facebook are out of gas (the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat) and that other players will have to come up with the underpinnings for the next big cycle of advances in computing. Granted, it's not as if any of these companies will disappear. But the idea that they'll go on generating ideas as groundbreaking as the ones that landed them in the spotlight defies common sense, statistics, and the lessons of history, which show that real innovation almost always comes from small companies. Apple, Google, and Facebook aren't too big to fail — but they may be too big to keep succeeding."
When all your in-house innovation leads to outhouse fabrication, you can easily switch gears. Buy everyone who innovates and shut out any possible competition. It's been the premier business road map for centuries.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
But I won't believe it till Netcraft confirms it.
To be fair, once Google gets their cars that drive themselves, glasses that give me information at all times, and provide TV/phone services through a high speed fiber connection for cheaper than anyone else, I'm ok if they take a break for a bit and coast, just improving what they've already done. THEN they can start on the jetpacks, holograms, and teleportation.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Google Glass is not completely new? In what way?
Yes there has been VR before and there has been AR before but not like this and not in a format digestable by any consumer.
I seriously think Glass is going to change the way people operate.
Summary says: Apple, Google and Facebook "areN'T too big too fail". Shouldn't it it say "are too big to fail" ? Makes more sense IMHO...
These companies cannot easily or quickly go way beyond their current expertise, like for example investigating human genome related innovations, but that does not mean that they cannot be transformative again. Apple as an example has released a lot of transformative products in a short time frame: iPod, iphone, ipad, macbook air have all been hugely influential. It is perhaps too high an expactations to expect them to keep up the current pace. However I think that the smartwatch, once it get released, can be another transformative step towards a world of in essence invisible, wearable computing. Google glass falls also in this category. I can also imagine that these companies will continue to buy up small companies with really good new ideas. Didn't Apple and Google each buy home automation companies? That is another area where I expect transformative products.
They are getting so much persona data from us all that they need to build 'n' more data centers around the world to process it all let alone all the data they are going to get from Glass.
Thankfully, if you Google for me, you come up with nothing. How long can I get away with this? My guess that not very long, eventually everyone will be have there relationship with everyone else mapped out all nice and cleanly and pretty for their NSA Overlords.
Google, the worldwide arm of the NSA. The world is sleep walking onto a surveileance state where the uSA is watching everyone in the world legally or not, they don't care really.
Amazon is cloud computing. The retailer part is just left overs from the 90's
I guess this isn't happening then? http://www.google.com/loon/
Maybe whoever wrote this article isn't impressed by interesting things that these companies create. Do they believe that because they are big and their innovations should also be "big"? This article is stupid.
Innovation comes from minds and the minds that invent the next big things can be in big companies just as easily as small ones. Link bait.
Without pioneering folks like Jack Kilby, you think we have electronic computers ?
Without hardware providers such as Intel which transformed CPU into affordable commodity items, you think we get $399 iPhone/iPad ?
And by the way, what kind of "innovation" FB has brought to the world ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When all your in-house innovation leads to outhouse fabrication
How much innovation is needed to fabricate a tiny room?
Buy everyone who innovates and shut out any possible competition
In this case, I believe you mean shit out any possible competition.
Facebook was the result of some epic timing, but I can't necessarily call them innovative. Before Facebook, there were some pretty well populated social networks, Myspace being the one whose problems they solved, but Geocities, AIM, and IRC before it also helped break ground. Facebook brought very few foundational ideas to the table.
Apple is a victim of its own success. No matter what they release, it will be compared to the iPhone (which brought smartphones and data plans to the masses), or the iPad (which all but started the tablet PC market). Very few companies have ever had products that successful, and the fact of the matter is that it's nearly impossible to maintain that momentum consistently.
Google might have a handful of good ideas left in it, but they have a different problem. When they started, it was basically a haven for geeks where they could throw Jell-O at the wall and see what stuck. I'm certain that there were projects that spent a week being added to the drawing board and were never pursued, to say nothing of the projects that have ultimately been scrapped over time. The problem is that Google has financial expectations on it now, which means that the geeks who could come up with some innovative ideas need to allocate their time pursuant to whether they can meet their deadlines. This kind of thinking leaves a lot of the gambling on the table.
Amazon doesn't need much innovation. They're the Wal-Mart of the internet, and this isn't a bad thing. They all but 'personify' the term "economies of scale". .If it's a good idea, Amazon can throw resources at it, whether it be servers, distribution, money, or audience. They have all of these things in great abundance, and generally keep their customers happy with cheap prices and (unlike wal-mart) generally very good customer service, and do so extremely efficiently. As long as they keep doing this, and do it as well as they have been for nearly 20 years, then they will continue to be profitable.
The problem with innovation in this context is that it doesn't seem to count, except when it does. The Newton was innovative. The PocketPC was, at some level, innovative. "Innovation" isn't what's being looked for. What is being looked for is "Innovation that immediately captures the public's attention and makes a substantial amount of money, market share, and mindshare in a very short period of time".
Innovation does NOT occur just in "big pieces" in hardware and software. Arguably, the major innovations done today affecting the 'big pieces' are logistical and nano-structure components. Jounalists often see only the forest, not the trees, so they can't see what has just popped out of the soil.
These innovations are leading to miniaturization at a fast rate, parts with new properties, electronics with new functions, multi-functions, faster performance and software that knows how to integrate functions across devices and time.
The innovations inside the new MacBook Air don't excite a journalist as he has "seen that before", but to an innovator there is a lot to see both in hardware, ICs, battery and software. People forget that the MacBook Air is about 1/4th of the weight of the old PowerBooks of a half dozen years back and are faster and work longer hours on a charge.
Improved software systems are easy for journalists to ignore because that requires testing and journalists are basically lazy on doing actual testing and comparisons and retrospective analysis as software systems improve.
Smart Watch? That's nothing more than what tinkerers were doing 10 years ago. Tech has just improved since then to make it less of a freakish side show idea.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This article must be flamebait. Google didnt invent much, there were dozens of search engines when it came around
There were, but they sucked. And I say this as someone who was at Carnegie Mellon when they came up with Lycos (and had been through webcrawler, and archie and veronica in the pre-http days), and suffered through altavista when it was still at digital.com and plenty of other early efforts.
The idea of using the number of links to a page as an indication of its importance was huge, and it and the rest of PageRank were truly innovative--you went from normally going through 5-10 pages of results and sometimes more to almost always having the thing you were looking for on the first page. Simply the concept of having an "I'm feeling lucky" button was unthinkable in the earlier days.
They were also among the earlier places to recognize that XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest wasn't just an Outlook plugin, bringing AJAX into the mainstream (which was hugely significant, and one of the reasons we're not saddled with shitty Flash sites anymore).
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It's part of the Ayn Rand mentality where all credit is given to the appropriate tyrant whether or not that guy is actually an "entrepenuer" or not. No one considers the little guy whether that's current upstart startups or just the cogs in the tyrant's company.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bingo! I've got Bingo!
Has nothing to do with the size, has everything to do with one mind (or rarely two) that run the company (or who no longer runs it). And I see correlation with how old they are (related to being driven perhaps). Companies aren't a democracy, when they lose their big innovator they just become run-of-the-mill from what I can observe.
-Ultimate Stickman Game Developer Infinite World Puzzler
— Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Stopped reading right there.
I'll go one further and say that the Facebook of 5 years ago was better than the Facebook of today. If that's considered innovation, then maybe Google and Apple are better off without.
So yeah I'm only a top UNIX syadmin for a 100 billion dollar 150 year old company so I may be out of the loop. But Apple, Google, and Facebook are exactly no where to be found in our platforms. It's the usual suspects, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, even Redhat. Maybe little Johnny with his phone counts as the world of computing online. Yes, some people with Mac laptops bother us sometimes because they are just too cool to use company issued stuff and instead end up being the most annoying little buggers of all because nothing the company uses works on their cool machines and they actually think we are thrilled to help them every other week even though.. sorry rambling.
You have to admit it's easier than doing real historical analysis, though! Technology is a complex thing, and analyzing who contributed to technological innovation requires a lot of tracing connections and contributions. You know, the kind of work historians of technology do.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier if, instead of having to do work, we could just sort companies by how much their stock has gone up, and declare that a measure of innovation?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
... these companies were founded on an initial innovation, but bought, borrowed or stole most of their innovation hence.
The truth is we don't know. Big groundbreaking ideas are rare which is why it is amazing Apple has had 3-4 in the entire history of the company (Not every year as media for some weird reason expects), Google 2-3 maybe, and Facebook 1. These companies simply refine existing ideas over and over and make them into great products. For example Google search was groundbreaking, but gmail was taking an existing idea and cleaning it up and making it something you might want to use. Google Earth was purchased from independent developers. Until someone reinvents the phone again we will likely never see a new product that takes off like iPhones and Android again, there is simply very few things almost all of the billions if people in the world wants to own. Breakthrough innovation is really rare, but it will continue to happen. In the mean time Google and Apple will refine like crazy (sorry, just can't bring myself to put Facebook in here) and continue to make great products.
Their innovation is being online, and are rather good at it.
There are arguments both ways on that. I've bought lots of books and CDs from Amazon (and still do buy a fair number of CDs), but Amazon's lockout policy with ebooks for owners of non-Kindle reader devices is just silly. I'm just one individual, and if Amazon have missed out on a few sales to me just because I happen to prefer a Sony reader, multiply that number by $BIGNUM and it. will end up as a sizeable chunk of money they have failed to grab.
.m4a to FLAC), though the selection of recordings is fairly limited.
Ditto their policy with music. Amazon offers a good service in allowing the buyer to listen to tracks before putting any money down. But since I have now built myself a decent music box, I prefer not to store CDs if I don't have to, so their silly policy of not selling recordings in lossless format often leads me to look elsewhere.
Even iTunes offers lossless recordings (it's easy to convert from
Google Glass is too nerd for common people.
I remember when the name "iPad" would provoke giggles.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why would I even read the link if the first line of is an obvious, lazy, over-generalized lie?
"Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Only a moron who's view of computing comes from the pages of Time magazine would make such a pathetic, sweeping overgeneralization ignoring the vast innovations that have been happening in the wold of computing, driven by thousands of innovative startups. Linux, cloud computing and a dozen other area have thrown up a wide variety of innovations that have nothing to do do with those three very important (well, two very important, plus Facebook) but overhyped companies.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
It looks at innovation only from the conumer stand point on what brand he sees as the end consumer. This is why I hate the press, why I hate journalists, and why I hate anyone who studies English or whatever other language is native to them in college. Your worthless pricks with no more understanding of the world, than the average guy mowing your lawn, or serving you burgers, but your confidence and arrogance in repeating urban legends and your inability to see your own confirmation bias is disgusting.
Your mentioing the biggest companies in tech who got there by buying innovation from start ups if the start ups were lucky, and downright stealing it if they weren't.
Apple invented nothing. They just used their massive PR campaign to popularize technology that previously existed, they still don't make but stuck their name on, to the rich hipsters, who are to socially concious to be looking like a nerd.
Google is probably the only one in the lot who at onetime invetened something. The remade webmail into the default mail interface, and they made the modern search engine.(first one that didn't suck).
Facebook was never a real innovator, except winding up on top of the social network game.
And if they're not lost in their own perception bias, their sole concern is how much money they are going to make for shareholders, at the expense of their users and sometimes developers.
The period from 1950s to the 1980s was the age of invention.
People haven gotten stupider since then. They have wisened up. Why spend hard work on invention when you can buy a patent. And these smart people have created an ecosystem which nurtures MBA, Law and other non contributing disciplines. Its the culture of "Manage" rather than do. And when everybody just goes ahead and wants a pie from the big machine, what happens, slowly but steadily, invention, innovation starts dying. Over every invention lies the sword of patent. Invent a new touch screen? Give it to XYZ for free because you are stepping on some tiny patent somewhere.
And this will continue. Very soon the engineers will vanish, and the world will be doomed, as deserved.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
google bought android, like they bought most other technologies they recently "innovated"
like apple bought mac os, and microsoft stole it.
the real innovators seldom get credit.
I wonder why no one wants to go into engineering or computers in college. Anyone who can, rather do business and own the ideas the engineers and computer people make, and then laugh when they kick them to the curb when they have nothing left to give.
GPL your code, and throw it on github, if your not business savy enough. Its that much more for the public tha parasites can't use leverage.
Apple has always been more about taking the technology available and packaging it into something easy to use and accessible.
Hear, hear!
Apple's real strength is industrial design. Their engineering is competent, but nothing terribly inventive (certainly not relative to the stature of the company). People whose only understanding of technology is going "ooh, ahh" over the latest consumer product don't seem to understand the difference. In terms of engineering and innovation the real McCoy has been the work done by others to create the latest gen fab process, OLED displays, or wireless standards and chip level implementation. Apple puts them together into nice packages. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but the real technological innovation comes from their suppliers and other companies.
Facebook is even less of a tech company. Obviously they use computers and networks, but so do banks. Does anybody call banks tech companies because of that? Facebook is about marketing an idea, not any great technological innovation.
In all fairness my original post overlooked Apple's chip design work. I don't know enough about it to say how innovative it is.
Article is nothing more than an attempt to play with the stock market. It is quite obvious when you start off with a giant pile of bullshit line like:
Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing.
Right, because there are only like 5 or 6 computing companies in the world. Certainly smaller companies could never contribute anything worthwhile to society. Oops, what he really means is that smaller companies are not good for stock trading.
And even still, the premise of "Apple and Google have run out of ideas," is ludicrous at best. (I will give him Facebook, they never had any ideas to begin with.)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
One thing is that some wallstreet wannabe wrote this, but that it pops up on Slashdot is another thing.
"And what FB innovated in, exactly?"
They've created an incredibly successful mechanism for gathering detailed information about millions of users. Unlike past methods of market research, FB has provided a sufficient incentive for people to willingly surrender troves of personal information.
Remember, FB users are the "product" not the "customer".
I'd never buy their stock, because I think they're a long term bust, but I've got to respect their talent for information gathering.
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap.
Very true, but what has Apple invented? A serious question. I can't think of anything, but I may easily have overlooked something (that and I'm not in the mood to be flamed by iFanBois). Apple's strength is industrial design and image.
I also agree Google really did create a better search engine, which is very useful. I wonder if AltaVista mightn't have done something similar if they hadn't been left to rot, but the bottom line is that they didn't.
However, the hype about Google's innovations since then have been overdone. They've bought some interesting companies. They've hired some big names in CS. They hire cool kids from fancy schools. It's a good place to work with multicolored geegaws in the lobby and free pan-Asian fusion cuisine (wouldn't mind that perk myself), but what great innovations have they come up with?
Every time Google does anything people go "ooh, ahh" because it came from Google. Even the driverless car thing is overhyped. They may have done some good work, but people act like they invented the very idea. IIRC it's heavily based on earlier work done for DARPA. More importantly, lots of other companies have been working on this, and developing useful things from it, for years. They're mostly car companies so people don't go "ooh, ahh, brilliant Silicon Valley innovation". They tend to take a bottom up rather than a top down approach, which may not stand out at the science fair, but parts of it actually get put into production. Google doesn't sell cars that park themselves. Production is where you really get to work out the kinks of how things do in the real world, hence this will be what actually leads to more autonomous cars in the real world. Google X is not going to suddenly going to start selling the Sergeymobile. It's akin to the progress of AI, where the old Minsky/McCarthy "lets write a bazillion lines of LISP and pass the Turing test" became a laughingstock decades ago. OTOH the AI that dare not speak its name, using a bottom up approach for things like machine vision, has been making serious progress for decades. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run.
didn't you mean peek data ?
In NSA America social networks join you!
You have to admit it's easier than doing real historical analysis, though! Technology is a complex thing, and analyzing who contributed to technological innovation requires a lot of tracing connections and contributions. You know, the kind of work historians of technology do.
How true. It amazes me how ignorant someone can be and still be called a reporter or pundit or whatever. Even the historians of technology, or at least the ones that write non-specialist books, often do a terrible job. All too often the history of technology (or science for that matter) is described as a series of isolated brilliant ideas. Utter nonsense. I'll bet most people think the Wright Brothers "invented" the airplane. Their big innovation was figuring out how to control an airplane in flight. Others had already created non-functional airplanes that had wings, propellers and motors good enough to fly.
Google's best innovations came in the server space, not the consumer one. They have dominated smartphones by buying a Linux variant, and their biggest contribution to 3rd party software development has been a purchased what is essentially reverse-engineered Java with some different libraries. If they had focused more on commercializing their server efforts, they could have been a major force in the enterprise, but it seems like they ceded that ground to Microsoft, much like MS has consistently ceded the consumer market to Apple by not adequately commercializing their own research projects.
The others are not really innovative.
Elon Musk has it right when he points out that Silly Valley is a great concentration of brainpower pursuing small ideas because of the ease of cashing in on them.
Maybe their will be more innovation in the internet space. After all it's attracting a lot of talent.
But really there are bigger problems. But because they are bigger it seems few want to take them on.
Social Graph and Scalability for large data sets. Facebook has definitely pioneered that domain (along with Google).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I am not sure where the author is getting the idea that these 3 companies "have generated most of the new ideas". Business momentum I can see, they had the brands, marketing department, and resources to get things out into the public sphere... but most of the new idea? Not by a long shot.
I do not accuse their engineers of sitting on their hands, they came up with some good stuff, but the bulk of the 'new ideas' tends to come from small companies, FOSS projects, research, and students screwing around. A lot of the ideas put out by those people are also crap, but then again a lot of the stuff coming out of the those big three are also pretty bad, even the ones that see the light of day.
I would say if anything it is the marketing departments and executive structures that are 'running out of steam'. As a company matures it tends to get entrenched people who have been there a while and are more interested in a steady return then experimentation and, more importantly, the companies tend to hire more and more 'classical' executives from other industries who are great at investor retaliations but tend to push the company into the 'endless sequels, people like what they have seen before!' direction.
the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat
Why is that surprising? They were running of cat names. The choices left were Cougar or Sabretooth. And then the next release would have had the same problem. They had to change the naming scheme eventually. They switched to big wave surfing spots. After a dozen or so versions, they may have to switch again.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
From the summary:
it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new
Like forever.
People who use the word innovation are either young or senile. Is there anything that is truly new? The secret to their success is not innovation but excellence. Apple, Facebook, and Google were not the first to make the products that they are famous for, not a single one. But theirs were maybe the best, or at least the favorite.
The reporter's focus on innovation instead of excellence is my first problem with the article. My other problem is his focus on the size of a company instead of its culture. Culture is more important.
Google, despite its size, looks like it has kept its culture of excellent execution and ideas that are --- I will say "fresh" instead of "new." They've been around before, for some reason failed to catch on, and here are being tried again, with tweaked settings or more competence or whatever so that maybe they'll work this time.
Apple, no matter its size, would probably have tapered off after the departure of Steve Jobs. Read his biography and you'll see just how much his relentless, even maniacal, perfectionism was behind Apple's products.
Facebook, I don't know enough about to comment. It could go either way.
If by "Generate" you mean "BUY", then i agree with you.
BUT, if by "Generate" you mean "INVENT", then i disagree with you.
Very true, but what has Apple invented? A serious question. I can't think of anything, but I may easily have overlooked something (that and I'm not in the mood to be flamed by iFanBois). Apple's strength is industrial design and image.
Apple don't invent. They refine, if you will. I think it's fair to say that they made some of the first desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets that a wide range of people from the average Joe to professionals would want to use, and that is an impressive feat. But to say they invented any of the products they sell wouldn't really be true.
(it's easy to convert from .m4a to FLAC)
It is also pointless... unless you meant the opposite.
Tomorrow is another day...
Hardly, comparing what Google does vs what Facebook does. Remember Youtube alone sports 1bn+ uniques per month. What is Facebooks entire user base again? 1bn users in total. So you take just one part of Google's kingdom and it amasses to more use and value to the internet then the entire Facebook kingdom. Infact I'd go as far to say Facebook and Youtube are comparibly similar companies, size and value wise.
Social Graph is just another unstandarised dtd and tag subset the internet can do without. We hated it when Microsoft did it but it's okay for Facebook to get away with it? I think not.
Facebook should of stayed with innovation regarding photo and photo distribution services. That's its niche and its most popular service. Instant Messaging, App development and location services are all been and done and the ones that do it, do it at an OS level, therefore there's no room for a middle man and why Facebook Home was a failure.
Not to be pedantic, but the "Ayn Rand mentality" is pretty much the opposite of what you think it is. The tyrants stealing credit (and everything else) are the *villains* and the "little guy (and gal)" entrepreneurs are the *heroes*. The current status quo would be considered a dystopia according to the Ayn Rand mentality.
What may be confusing you is that some of the protagonists were successful industrialists who admittedly aren't "the little guy" at that point in their careers, but they were in the minority compared to those that acted as you say. They didn't rise to the top by stealing from underlings but earned it by actually being the best. Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy. That last bit is what usually rubs people the wrong way, causing them to reject Rand in knee-jerk fashion without really understanding what she was saying.
Sometimes geeks have an abysmal grasp of history.
http://www.carhistory4u.com/the-last-100-years/car-production
"During the period 1896 to 1930 over 1,800 car manufacturers were believed to have existed in America"
How many now?
Basically three, although there's a few niche makers like Tesla.
Mature industries consolidate into oligopolies.
Welcome to the end of the IT Boom.
Not to be pedantic, but the "Ayn Rand mentality" is pretty much the opposite of what you think it is.
I don't think I'd want to live in a world where charity is considered a character flaw, but in fairness I've read her books and c0d3g33k is right.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
The problem isn't a **current** lack of innovation...
The problem is non-techies do not understand the difference between a true 'innovation' and a new product that sells alot and gets media hype.
iPod sells alot, has good ads, and gets alot of press. iPod then becomes, in retrospect to the mind of a non-techie, an 'innovation'...and the marketer who brought it to completion...well he's the 'innovator'...
wrong. iPod wasn't an 'innovation' and Steve Jobs was a marketer/salesman.
however, that's not the end at all! The **click wheel** was the 'innovation' and it wasn't designed by Jobs. But ask any young kid to name an 'innovator' and they'll say Jobs, the salesman.
Not 'knocking' Steve Jobs (getting major lables to put their music on iTunes IMHO required true innovative salesmanship)...
The greater point is that a grand misunderstanding of why tech is awesome and the nature of 'innovation' in practice...that misunderstanding creates the context where this errant article could be developed.
Don't look at what sells to find innovation...that's a lagging indicator...look at what busy people in high stress jobs do to get things done...it's the pressure of necessity that mother's innovation ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
I bet they invented something. It's not on the user end or really evident, but there is a reason they are able to monetize things as well as they do and probably better than the other sites that did the same. I bet they've made some significant advances in data mining and usage. To many people that may seem like making advances in concentration camp technology, but it's still useful for making money.
It's true that social networks and search engines were built or innovated on the shoulders of giants, but the important thing is not that they had to do something truly new in order to transform our lives - the innovation came from the lives of the users, not from the specific code technology implemented to produce it, and their effects were sweeping and permanently transformative in their nature.
15 years ago, we didn't have a way to instantly receive news tailored to our specific interests, keep in touch with people constantly anywhere in the world to the point that we might as well be right next door to them, automatically sync and permanently back up all of our digital photos, target our online searches to exactly what we wanted to find, or look up anything on anyone or any subject in seconds, especially without being tethered to a desktop. While Facebook is finding that they can't really expand past certain core areas of their offerings, the inherent use of what they've created is a thing that would not otherwise exist, and that *is* an invention. Many social networks since have tended to model themselves after Facebook's innovations, in the same way that MMORPGs all looked like EVE or WoW after their success.
They might not be amazing or particularly interesting technologies so much as impressive exercises in optimization, but they've certainly had such a radical effect on people all over the world that it should be considered an invention of sorts. We couldn't fully envision the scope of what a Facebook or Google could do to the world, and the world was both modeled after and changed by their existence. It would be foolish to say that they're done innovating on any of these counts.
But that backend innovation can only take place if consumers buy a lot of appliances. I believe that what Apple does is important, since it seems it's one of the few companies able to push hardware forward. They set the trend to kill the floppy, provide good web browsers on smartphones, get rid of mechanical hard drives and now they are doing the same with the DVD drive. Plus the energy efficiency of their products are often overlooked but it is one of their most important features imho.
Other companies like Facebook also provides technology in the form of software. You can be a tech company and only produce specialized polymers.
*Voluntary* charity was not considered a character flaw, but the mentality that all heaven and earth must be put on hold and all endeavors must be taken from until every single person has food most certainly is.
It's treating everyday life as if it was some emergency situation, squatting on the development of industry that actually lifts people out of shitholes.
"The question is not, 'Should I or shouldn't I give a beggar a dime?' The question is whether the beggar should have a first claim on your life and your efforts."
And, finally, help to poor people is a drop in the bucket nowadays compared to the cumulative obesity that is government (including almost $2 trillion a year in regulatory burden on top of all the taxation.)
Nobody listens. Nobody cares. They live in their little world of 80-IQ Life Guidance Memes that tell them how to think, binding them as a mass behind their power-hungry leaders.
Wait, what was this thread about again?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Shuddup and go back to programming Java, the carefully and specially-designed Internet programming language.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I think it's better to say that:
-Google is a huge data mining operation with zero concern for user's privacy. They give free tools to developers and end-users to provide an incentive so people will give away more info. The more they can gather from you the more money they can make.
-Facebok is another huge data mining operation with zero concern for user's privacy. They allow people to socialize better as an incentive to keep giving away your personal information. As with Google, the more they can gather from you the more money they can make..
-Apple is an overpriced hardware company with the firm intention of creating vendor lock-in either through hardware or software. The more they can lock you in the more money they make.
-Microsoft is a monopolistic software vendor with the firm intention of creating vendor lock-in so they can keep charging you for continual upgrades to their systems. The more they can lock you in the more money they make.
As you see, this is the main reason why the Free Software Foundation is totally right regarding software freedom. There are zero guarantees that an undemocratic for-profit corporation, especially the big ones will play fair. The government is supposed to do that but they are too slow and not prepared to deal with such tasks. The main problem is that we have software patents and hardware is not exactly open source, where I believe vendors should be forced to document how to interface with their equipment at the very least.
Rand's ideal world would be a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy.
Meritocracy is a wonderful ideal that I wish our society were closer to, but there is no reason for a meritocracy to be "unforgiving" as you put it. There are two separate issues. The only one that meritocracy accurately refers to is on what basis people rise to a more powerful, more prestigious and/or better paid position. The other issue, which is often falsely conflated with meritocracy, is how much of a difference there is between different people's wealth, income and power. US inequality has grown dramatically in recent decades even as, I'd argue, we've become less meritocratic.
The Internet of Thing is the next big IT revolution. It needs IPv6, BigData and 3D printing to really kick off though.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
This article feels a little trollish to me. Sorry.
Flying balloon WiFi, boom!
Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.
Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.
That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.
The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.
In general Facebook validated the so-called social networks, and made them work for everybody. Something MySpace and others were not able to do. Facebook was also able to make photo sharing and commenting extremely easy and created a platform for web games with massive audiences. If you remember well, before Facebook, people had to use stuff like Classmates.com to try and find each other. So all of those were big game changers. Also the whole concept of the global village is pretty much synthesized in there.
But of course, then we have the privacy issues and data mining operations, which are huge. They could have lived perfectly by only charging people for extra storage of pictures, and good old-fashioned newspaper style advertising by region, but the greed of companies like Google and Facebook knows no bounds. So we have this situation now where everything you do is being tracked online. Just check on your web logs how many times your computer talks to Facebook and Google domains per session even if you don't visit those websites.
Mind blowing, industry disruptive invention is not going to stop. It's just that it doesn't happen rapidly and never has! Apple first built iPad prototypes internally and decided to take the technology to the iPhone and release it first. So in 2007 before the iPhone was announced there was an early iPad prototype. The iPad didn't get announced until 2010! So for three more years the iPad was refined and improved, while the iPhone was also improved. Only when Apple was satisfied enough with the iPad was it released to the public. The App Store wasn't announced until 2008. The MacPro hasn't changed much since 2010, but the new cylindrical MacPro was announced via sneak peak at WWDC 2013. I would bet money it's been in design for years! A new design starts after the last one shipped. There may be a bit of a break after a stressful launch but they always go right back to the drawing board when they return. One of the reasons the 2010 MacPro wasn't updated were Xeon delays at Intel. The Xeon E5 Ivy Bridge / E3 Haswell design hasn't really started shipping till now. The E5 Xeon is the processor of choice used in workstations and smaller servers. So the new MacPro cylindrical design will have dual E5 Xeon's with up to 12 cores (6 cores each).
Apple's pace hasn't changed, they have always been about releasing when it's ready and not before. The media forgets how long it took for these products to ship. I guess there was this long period of customer awe in between that's dissipated lately as new products are not as stunning. That doesn't mean there are not things in the R&D pipeline that will change the world! There has always been an attention to detail with Apple designs that exceed that of the rest of the industry. The secrecy is what drives articles like this. But it's also what allows Apple to compete. If they announce products early, the competition will have a "Me Too" product ready. Even though a "Me Too" doesn't come close, it will be cheaper and not as good but will still sell fairly well.
Apple is working on changing television as we know it. I have already built a home solution that far exceeds what the industry has available. However, it's extremely geeky and not ready for general consumer use. But I can watch the TV shows and movies I want, how I want, when I want, and where I want. I have complete freedom to beam it around the house from iPhone, iPad, and multiple TV's. I have a server that manages the content like a TiVo would but much much better. It's the media delivery mechanism and the content itself that has to adapt. Apple is no doubt struggling to get the media companies to play ball. Movies studios, TV networks, Sports distribution channels, etc. They all have to radically change the way they do business. It's not about Prime Time any more. I don't consume media on a schedule any more. I rarely watch live TV. I don't see commercials. I can pause a show in the living room and resume it in the bedroom or on an iPad (No, it's not AT&T Uverse either and it's not streamed from a data center). I can even have new shows transcoded and sync'd to the iPad so when I take a long train commute, I can watch my show on an iPad offline. Apple's competitors know they are working on TV and they are trying to produce new TV's that innovate. Samsung has voice and motion controls, Sony has PS4, Microsoft XBox One, etc. They all think they know what Apple is doing but I would bet they aren't even close. Apple cannot announce their new TV solution until they can get the content providers in line. They did it first with the music industry and they did it with the book industry now it's time to do it with the TV/Movie/Video industries.
Google is not a tech company, they are an advertising company that uses technology. Facebook is not a tech company, they are a social media advertising company that uses cheesy technology. Apple is not a technology company either but a design company that mixes technology and the liberal arts. HP, Samsung, etc., etc. these are electron
The problem with your rationale is that the 1bn Facebook users are contributing with a lot more details in general than your regular Youtube visitor. So there is no way Facebook and Youtube are comparable in that regard. You don't see all companies rushing to create a Youtube channel while having a Facebook presence is kind of a must these days.
I think all of these companies created something new and it is the very fact why they became huge in the first place.
In general Facebook validated the so-called social networks, and made them work for everybody. Something MySpace and others were not able to do. Facebook was also able to make photo sharing and commenting extremely easy and created a platform for web games with massive audiences. If you remember well, before Facebook, people had to use stuff like Classmates.com to try and find each other. So all of those were big game changers. Also the whole concept of the global village is pretty much synthesized in there.
Google's search engine was and it still is the main drive behind the company. But Maps, with their scrollable Ajax tiles pretty much made competing products look like a toy. Same deal with Gmail, and they even created the next Windows without even realizing it, which is Android.
I had some hopes for Microsoft after they created Bing, XBox360, .NET, but lately they seem to be failing in all areas now, and if they are not playing catch up they are screwing their traditional products in a very weird way, from Windows to the Surface. Still, they have plenty of money so there is time to reinvent the company after Ballmer and the suits step down. Just taking a look at who's head of the Windows division speaks volumes about why they are producing these kind of crap. Previous guy left after behaving like a sociopath, new one has a business degree and work on "user experience". The head of OSX is a guy who is both an electrical engineer and a computer science major with a master on CS, and part of the NeXT team, hardly a person chosen by internal office politics. And if you look at Linux, well, the guy who pretty much started the whole thing still runs the show.
So my point is that as long as you have the hackers, the engineers and the resources we will still see plenty of innovation as we did with the Facebook kid, or the Google boys. Microsoft needs to either become an IBM with a sound service infrastructure and top management or go back to being the software powerhouse it once was.
You are wielding a blunt club. I can use your same argument to claim that no one ever invented anything, since all inventions rest on some other invention.
It is easy to look at Google and say that anything they do bears some resemblance to something else. This is especially true if you think Google is a search company, or an ad company. It's not.
Google is a huge AI research lab. Search is one application of AI, and displaying ads pays the bills. Most of the work that goes on at Google involves pattern matching of some sort. Google is innovating all of the time (data center efficiency, green energy use, more efficient web information transfer, AI algorithms that form knowledge graphs, control systems that treat the entire datacenter as a single computer, and on and on). And those innovation are presented to the public in the form of research papers.
Those innovations are not immediately obvious to people who think Google is just a search engine and/or advertising company.
Google, Apple, and Facebook were never "groundbreaking". They were well executed implementations of largely known technologies and ideas. And much of the innovation that came out of these companies actually was acquired, when they bought up startups and academics, thereby also spreading the wealth.
And that's not going to stop either: people are going to continue to come up with innovative ideas, form small startups, and then the Googles and Apples of this world are going to buy them and stick their name on it.
Just to be clear, I didn't say "THE ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy", I said "RAND's ideal world is a true and quite unforgiving meritocracy" in an attempt to concisely summarize the "Ayn Rand mentality". Didn't mean to imply that an unforgiving meritocracy was ideal or that I thought it was. To be fair, that isn't really what Rand considered ideal either, but that's a conversation for another venue. Your points are well taken, though possibly veering even more off-topic than my response to the GP. :-)
Google's search engine was and it still is the main drive behind the company. But Maps, with their scrollable Ajax tiles pretty much made competing products look like a toy
But Google Maps isn't really a Google innovation--it was conceived by 2 Technologies, who pitched the idea to them. Google certainly recognized the value and ran with it (and acquired them in 2005).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
*Voluntary* charity was not considered a character flaw
Rand seemed to view the world in black and white terms, where, to use her words, selfishness is good and altruism is bad. I applaud her for being a strong voice that what people do should be voluntary, but that doesn't mean we need a moral case against wanting to do things for other people.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Stop trying to be a smartass and recognize that all of those companies not only brought innovation but they keep bringing value. Hell they are the main reason why the US leads on tech by a long shot. Even a country like China that blocks foreign companies to favor local ones had to bow down to Apple and Android.
And in case you still don't believe Facebook is important, just ask yourself what everybody was doing before Facebook. How many people you know actually became a lot more interested in computers after seeing something like Facebook or Skype? Seeing grown-ups and even the elderly stuck to idiotic games like Farmville was beyond my comprehension but even then I had to admit that Facebook truly hit the nail in the head.
I'll tell you what Facebook innovated. (You're not going to like it, though, because we tend to think of innovation as synonymous with "progress" and progress is usually measured in terms of end user utility. And what I'm about to say is totally not that.)
Facebook somehow had a website that was popular (that's not a part of the innovation, but it's an extremely important prerequisite) and then got a million other websites to embed references to Facebook resources into theirs, like Google did with Google Analytics. Since most browsers, by default, are happy to load any embedded resource referenced on a page, that gave Facebook an incredible number of "hits" from diverse sources.
Most classical (i.e. naive) 1990s-thinking web people would see these "hits" as totally valueless, because they're not pageloads, they aren't showing ads that you got paid to run, or whatever. The clever people, though, saw that you use this sort of thing with a cookie and combined with referer[sic], to build marketing profiles.
The mid-late 1990s clever people knew that too, but their references were ads themselves (e.g. doubleclick). They had to pay to get other webmasters to embed this crap. Nobody is going to embed a doubleclick image (i.e. an ad for something) unless you give them money.
You don't get paid to embed Google Analytics javascript, though. You don't get paid to embed a Facebook "like" button. So Facebook can do all the same "spying" that doubleclick.net could do a decade earlier, but without paying for it.
And webmasters embed these things for free, because they feel they get something out of it. With Google Analytics, you get the reports and analysis. Sure, you could get a lot of that from your own logs, but not all of it (Google knows some things about your visitors, that you might not, and this is their business, they're able to "keep up") and GA is easy and there and waiting for you. With Facebook like buttons, discussions, etc, webmasters are counting on the popularity of Facebook, to make it so that people who use their own site, will generate events on their Facebook profiles which will be seen by other Facebook users who don't use their own site, and maybe someone will curiously click through and you get a new visitor.
You gotta give Facebook some credit for that. I get how Google turns their spying into money, but I still don't really understand how Facebook does. (Apparently Wall Street doesn't understand it either, judging from the ever-falling stock price.) But there's probably an angle, and however it can be used, Facebook has very successfully put into place at least half of it already. Getting so much of the web to embed your script or iframe (and without having to pay them for it) -- holy crap, I totally can't imagine that happening fifteen years ago.
So it's innovation. Just not the kind users like to see happen.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
" just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing."
Those three companies are responsible for most of the ideas and business momentum in CONSUMER computing. Enterprise IT has been innovating at a brisk clip without contributions from those three companies, thank you very much.
There is a lot of good tech out there that hardly see the masses, so the real innovation is making it happen. Is it important that there were pseudo-smartphones before the iPhone or prehistoric tablets before the iPad? The Ford Model-T was not an innovation in itself since it was about making a car affordable.
It is difficult to discuss objectivism with people who,whether they are for or against, fail to recognize John Galt as a negative example.
Not if the .m4a is encoded using Apple's own lossless format, which they also store in a MPEG 4 container.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
help to poor people is a drop in the bucket nowadays compared to the cumulative obesity that is government
Which demolishes your own criticism of "all heaven and earth must be put on hold and all endeavors must be taken from until every single person has food". Clearly you can feed everyone without halting all else. To what extent that "all else" should be in the government sphere is a different issue.
They live in their little world of 80-IQ Life Guidance Memes that tell them how to think, binding them as a mass behind their power-hungry leaders.
While the Great Minds of Slashdot toil in vain to halt the Supremacy of Mediocrity? Don't flatter yourself. Hans Reiser is a smart guy, but he's now getting free room and board courtesy of the State of California. Intelligence is not the same as wisdom or self control.
To know what was before is important to understand why the product that finally created the mass market managed to do just that.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
In the early 1980's IBM, a dinosaur sued for monopoly, released the PC and changed the world. Sure, Apple,IMSI, and others had blazed a trail, but IBM quickly defined the market.
Even a dinosaur can give birth to a flock of new birds. Don't give up on our big boys.
I read a lot of the computer science and applied math literature and it's full of good work by people from Google or funded by Google.
That's great, but it's not the same as introducing products and services that use that stuff. I don't know for sure how much of Google's work makes it into real products or services, but there have been too many companies with great research work that didn't make it into production (not because it was impractical either). IIRC Microsoft research did great stuff, but what really made it into products? GM research of yore was also often like that.
Google or any other company is not going to have the next Bell Labs. That was an unusual situation because AT&T's corporate charter said X% of profits were supposed to be plowed back into R&D, and they didn't have to change that back when it was a national monopoly.
Very true, but what has Apple invented? A serious question.
For example... IEEE Standard arithmetic (together with Intel).
For example... An efficient method for drawing into non-rectangular areas. Which is essential for overlapping windows (thanks, Bill Atkinson).
Just to mention a few things that are not widely known.
It is difficult to discuss anything with people who demand acceptance of their opinion of the subject as a foregone conclusion and prerequisite.
One of these things is not like the other...
Facebook and Google's biggest innovation is that they made privacy unfashionable for their hundreds of millions of users. Oh sure, there are still privacy advocates but more and more they sound like those weird basement geeks with too much time and not enough money in their hands. Now when we hear about government surveillance we simply shrug, thinking that it can't be that bad because even Google is doing it. And we know that Google can't possibly be evil.
If you're talking about sheer data size you're wrong, since the GP's statement was regarding data storage.
If you're talking about individual bits of data, it's almost impossible to measure against eachother (unlesss both companies released figures). Facebook would host a lot of data in relation to messaging services but that alone brings up more problems in gauging the size and activity of Facebook. Every time I log on to my PC Gtalk and Skype runs the background. People who use Facebook occupy Facebook for prelonged periods because of how the service is devised. I'm almost certian that if it was a desktop app that ran in the task tray FB's page duration time would falter (right now my friend is using Facebook right next to me, she's having to sit on a website to "chat" to her family overseas, she'll log off Facebook and call them via Skype later in the day to have a conversation, a conversation that will cost her real money) *.
Consider, the average size of a WMV or MPG is far larger than wall posts and resized JPGs. Further, the Play Store (which is a part of YouTube) supports distribution of movies and music and does so to SmartTV's, SmartPhones, Gaming Consoles even most new BlueRay players sport a YouTube player of some sort.
* I do realise that Facebook is upping its game regarding these forms of services, the issue is that alot of it sits on 3rd party platfroms (like Skype), in actual fact a lot of Facebooks interactive services (such as Maps / Translations services) rely on the Microsoft.
P.S I wont even go into Facebook pages, many people may have them, many people may use them. I have now setup several of the things with paid adverising surrounding them, Google Adwords still drives more relvant and better customers to business sites. FB pages get likes, FB pages dont get $$ in peoples pockets and the latest figures show that nearly 2 / 3's of advertisers do not know how affective FB pages / FB advertising is for their companies - but this is another rant for another day.
I'm talking about the objective measurement of Galt against his own standards, not some moral judgement of how liked he is. He totally devotes not only his own work but that of everyone else to the sake of other...just not to benefit them but to spite them. In the name of individualism he organizes one of the greast collective actions in his history.
John Galt would consider John Galt a failure.
You're talking to yourself about Galt. No one else was. Rand, what her views actually were (originally raised by the parent of this thread as peripherally relevant to the question of innovation in large modern corporations)? Yes. Galt? No. Let it go. There will be other opportunities - wait for them. You're waaaay off topic here.
It's even older than that. Sinclair ZX-80. Out of the box, basically neutered - 1k. Expansion port + devices (like RAM) and suddenly you could do stuff. And you know what people often did with it? Took it out of the stock case and moved it into one where they could add more stuff.
Apple's new Mac Pro... the very best idea I've heard of so far is a case that the new Mac Pro would load right into, in which the drive bays and video conversion connectors to standard video tech would be placed. Bingo... you get the horsepower of the machine, the clean design of a proper all in one system, the physical and vibrational security of enclosed drives, single power supply, perhaps even a PCI chassis. And best of all? You don't have a stupid trashcan on your desk.
Of course, if they price that trashcan where I expect them to, that's the end of that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Look, I *own* a Mac Pro. It's a great machine. The new one... it's neither innovative or great.
A machine that requires external expansion? Not new since Sinclair ZX-80 (or probably earlier.) A high power design that uses a vertical cooling tower? Audio's been doing this forever; all kinds of actually innovative cooling designs can be found in the history of audio power amplifiers. Tunnels, polygons, forced air, liquid, even semiconductor. Odd physical configuration? Tons of 'em out there. Raspberry pi. Mini ITX. or this. The new Mac Pro has a new CPU in it, as does virtually every iteration of these machines; it has a flash boot drive, like a lot of computers; and you're gonna have to spend a lot more money to make a worthwhile computer out of it... like a ZX-80. It's also likely to be very, very expensive. You know what that spells? "Not Buying"
But hey. You can always by a Mac Mini or an iMac. Those, at least, are working multicore computers out of the box. Or, I hasten to add, the current generation Mac Pro, which is a great machine.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Facebook never really innovated anything except Facebook. Google innovated search and better email, but has switched trying to compete with Facebook. Apple has always innovated, even if it meant sacrificing successful products (eg: The famous killing off of the iPod Mini at the peak of its success.). I think he is wrong that Steve Jobs was Apple's chief innovator. Steve simply focussed doggedly on whatever ideas he had until he could make them reality, and fairly never compromised. Now if Apple can keep that focus... He is right about innovation though overall. The announcement of iTunes Radio and car integration seems to be more about the spread and normalisation of existing technology. Everyone is focussed on maps and getting people to interact with where they are right now. The technology has to become over-saturated and stagnant and open the way for someone to innovate at the right place and time.
What is the point of the internet?
the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat
Yea, it's named after a Meerkat...how original.
Statistically, you're looking at it all wrong. Lots of companies innovate, including the big ones. But any given innovation only has a 1 in 10,000 chance of succeeding.
If you get it right, then you've a decent shot at hitting the big leagues like Apple, Google, MS and FB.
But assuming because they managed a successful innovation once means they've got a greater chance of finding a second one is ludicrous. It's like expecting a lottery winner has a better chance of winning a second prize.
Of course, having said that, there are some companies that *have* managed multiple successful innovations, but they're *exceedingly* rare.
(I'd give Apple the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I'd give MS MS-DOS, Windows and Office. At this point, Google and FB are still one trick ponies. But they're magnificent tricks. Criticizing such companies is like criticizing someone for only holding one world record.)
Social apps have seen their peak and the next cycle of growth will come from what we currently term 3D printing. Perhaps the most indepth review of this is Kevin Carson's 'The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.' Combined with the sustainability and maker movements, the changes in global fabrication will make the likes of Facebook and Apple seem about as historically pertinent as Betamax and pet rocks.
"Well, at the risk of making myself into a pariah around Silicon Valley, I have a prediction to make"
Sigh. I hate people who write that kind of silly crap. If you're so worried about your image in some kind of idiotic Silicon Valley nerd club, your opinion is likely to be entirely irrelevant.
It is interesting but anti-innovative. They use a more old fashioned sort of "hand crafted" design with modules which is less automated than the designs that people like Samsung use. The result is a chip that is:
a) Better fitted to one unique piece of hardware
b) Slower and more expensive than the generic though often the fit makes it equal
c) Less power consummative then the generic
Using animation and capacitive touch screen together for a web based system was unique to Apple. That was innovation. Display postscript which became display pdf was innovation. Objective-C was innovation. Etc..