Avoiding BlackBerry's Fate: How Apple Could End Up In a Similar Position (marco.org)

It's almost unbelievable today that BlackBerry ruled the smartphone market once. The Canadian company's handset, however, started to lose relevance when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. At the time, BlackBerry said that nobody would purchase an iPhone, as there's a battery trade-off. Wittingly or not, Apple could end up in a similar position to BlackBerry, argues Marco Arment. Arment -- who is best known for his Apple commentary, Overcast and Instapaper apps, and co-founding Tumblr -- says that Apple's strong stand on privacy is keeping it from being the frontrunner in the advanced AI, a category which has seen large investments from Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon in the recent years. He adds that privacy cannot be an excuse, as Apple could utilize public data like the web, mapping databases, and business directories. He writes: Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for. If they're right -- and that's a big "if" -- I'm worried for Apple. Today, Apple's being led properly day-to-day and doing very well overall. But if the landscape shifts to prioritise those big-data AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: what they're able to do, despite being very good at it, won't be enough anymore, and they won't be able to catch up. Where Apple suffers is big-data services and AI, such as search, relevance, classification, and complex natural-language queries. Apple can do rudimentary versions of all of those, but their competitors -- again, especially Google -- are far ahead of them, and the gap is only widening. And Apple is showing worryingly few signs of meaningful improvement or investment in these areas. Apple's apparent inaction shows that they're content with their services' quality, management, performance, advancement, and talent acquisition and retention. One company that is missing from Mr. Arment's column is Microsoft. The Cortana-maker has also placed large bets on AI. According to job postings on its portal, it appears, for instance, that Microsoft is also working on Google Home-like service.

Comments

WTF Is the Submitter Smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Where Apple suffers is big-data services and AI, such as search, relevance, classification, and complex natural-language queries"

Yeah, because Siri is absolutely the worst AI on the planet... (despite the fact that she's better at human interpretation than anything anyone has ever put in a consumer platform, of course...)

Re:WTF Is the Submitter Smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure. That's why, to this day, Siri returning the correct answer is met with "holy crap it worked!"

Have you ever tried any of the competing services mentioned in the summary?

Plus, I remember one of the big things about Siri people would talk about is how she would "remember context" and base her answers on that. Except she doesn't. It's clearly based off key-words that trigger responses. Say something she interprets as a weather-phrase? Get the weather report. Say something she interprets as a business-phrase? Get a business search. Say anything she doesn't recognize? Get a Bing search.

That's not AI, that's a series of regular expressions.

Re:WTF Is the Submitter Smoking?

[josquin9]

". . . machine learning is a core competence of Google."
And monetizing consumer data is their core business model.

I will admit that Google's results are often better. However, my privacy has value to me as well, and the cost/benefit doesn't work out in my head. I'll stay with the company that's not trying to build a model of me to sell to advertisers as long as I the service is available. I'm not confident it will be long, since the large population of users that haven't consciously considered the long-term ramifications of so much of their personal data being harvested have established a standard that doesn't weight privacy very highly.

  I'll enjoy the availability of alternatives while I can, though.

Re:WTF Is the Submitter Smoking?

[AchilleTalon]

Like the alternatives are not doing the same. Really naive.

Apple has an insane amount of money

[Anonymous Coward]

If AI becomes the next big thing, they will just buy their way into the game with acquisitions. Or they'll buy their way into a whole new market.

Blackberry never had anywhere close to the money Apple does, it's like comparing apples to prime rib.

Re:Apple has an insane amount of money

[Penguinisto]

Here's the thing - Apple is kind of picky in many aspects.

They don't chase the new-shiny just because it is new and shiny, but only when/if it makes sense for the products (both present and planned).

Also, you mention wireless charging. Yeah, it's been around for awhile - if you actually like either lashing something on to make it bulky, or sacrificing performance/capacity/battery-life to it. After all, you gotta make room for it, which means something has to go to make that room.

In Apple's case, it's probably a demand to never compromise the bonuses your product has (e.g. insane battery life, etc) just to make room for a new-shiny. That's why it hadn't shown up in the iPhone yet (Mind, I say this as a guy who owns an Android phone.)

Bad conclusion

[tom229]

Why would Apple ever care about your privacy more than their profits? They probably just don't think it's going to be that big of a thing. I tend to agree. All this stuff kinda reminds me of VR 30 years ago. It's neat, but kinda gimmicky. It's all supposed to be in the 5-10 year future? Try 30-50, and even then, as the article points out, it's a big maybe.

Re:Bad conclusion

[macs4all]

Why would Apple ever care about your privacy more than their profits?

Two reasons:

1. They really DO have a longstanding corporate culture of NOT selling-out their customer base. That is because they have always fancied themselves as a Hardware company (which they are), who's profits are based on sales of Hardware, not Customer-Data.

2. Because they have (rightly) sensed that they are getting a reputation for being one of the few (or maybe only) large tech companies that does value their Customers' privacy, and as a result, there is no disconnect between that stance and increased profits. In fact, the more the national (and international) mood swings against the Panopticon, the more attractive Apple looks to a lot of people.

Of course it will happen to them

[pablo_max]

It happens to nearly all companies.
Once on top of the world, the next moment hanging on to survive.
Who have we got?
Motorola
RIM
Palm
braodcom
yahoo
AOL
Nokia
Sony. Remember when everyone wanted SONY gear?
Hell, it has even happened to Apple before.
People are fickle. If some hot new thing comes along with a better way of doing things, then people will generally follow the trend. If the old guard is too slow, then they get left in the dust, living off their cash reserves until eventually, the die. Apple is no exception. Innovate or die.

G+

[Anonymous Coward]

G+ being a classic example of the privacy problem Google faces. Technically it was excellent, yet who wants to give Google yet more private information!

So Google's new messaging app will listen in on the conversation and suggest restaurants and nearby bars if you talk about meeting up etc. it will look at photos you send each other and interdict with recipes and themes connected to the content of those pictures....

WHO THE FOOK WANTS THIS? And to do this, they can't support end to end encryption because they'd be cutting themselves out of the conversation! GOOD! They were never invited INTO the conversation in the first place! Can you imagine talking about medical problems with a friend, knowing that Google is listening in? And by Google I mean people, because Google's engineer can access your data [ Quack for "David Barksdale" ].

Blackberry's big selling point was privacy, but as they bent over backwards to get their phone into third world markets like India and Pakistan, so it became clear they'd backdoored the encryption. Then there was the phones, an excellent keyboard messaging phone becomes an awful android copy with a backdoor.

Re:Since 1984

[jcr]

As I've often said... Apple Computer: on the brink of oblivion since 1975!

-jcr

Au Contraire

[xtal]

One could also argue a major decline in BlackBerry's brand started in ~2008 with the Indian government encryption key debacle.

Privacy matters. I will continue to buy iPhones even for no other reason than the principled stand that Tim Cook took against the FBI.

I suspect I am not alone.

Re:Since when did Apple "rule" smartphones?

[T.E.D.]

Only if you count all the out of date crap. I dont count ANY phone not running Android 6 as ...

It doesn't much matter how you count. For example, here's a graph of new phone shipments. Android phones are more than 80% at the end there, and climbing. Here's one for actual sales. The best you can say for Apple here is that they are bouncing around under 25% (with Android over 75%). This has been going on for 5 years now, so installed base graphs should (and do) show almost the same picture.

On the plus side, since this has been going on for 5 years now, there's no good reason to believe Apple's 20-25% of the market is suddenly going to go away. There's also, of course, no good reason to believe it will enlarge.

Re:Sigh...Another "If I Ran Apple" Douchebag

[ausekilis]

I'll hop on this "if I ran Apple" bandwagon... if only for a small, short-lived, digital soapbox.

I would argue Apples big claim to fame is not just the iPhone, but it's integration into one Apple ecosystem. The idea of Apple components playing nicely together without the need for endless tinkering is huge in the realm of people that don't have the desire/capability to cobble together everything their house needs. If anything, Apple hasn't invested enough in the desktop PC/video game market. If the Apple TV were a bit more powerful (and they removed that Apple remote requirement), they could handle some streaming akin to the nVidia shield. Instead, they've got Macs running 3 year old hardware, with crappy video drivers (or so I've read), with next to no support for games.

i fail to see how Apple, as a hardware company, is really going to lose by not having Googles capability to integrate web searches with advertising.