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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.
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.
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.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
We were fresh off a seven-night cruise in New Orleans, with a lot of dirty clothes to wash, and our hotel did not have laundry facilities for the guests.
So, I said to my Nexus 6p, "OK, Google: I need a f***ing laundromat."
I never imagined there was so much laundromat pr0n in the world...
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.
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.
You think so?
I should point out of course, that Siri is NOT an Apple invention. They bought it. I agree though, it does work reasonably well.
I personally find the "OK Google" more useful as it more fits the way that I use my phone day to day. Especially when in the car.
My head unit supports Carplay and Android Auto. Honestly, Apple's current state of Carplay is why I switched back to Android. After doing so is when I discovered that "OK Goggle" is pretty damn good in the car.
Then again, machine learning is a core competence of Google. It would be silly to think that Apple would be able to roll out a product of similar polish.
The title implies that Apple "rules" smartphones today...but Google's share is 80% of the market. Logically, the reaction to a future "oh nos Apple is dead" should be "meh - another second-tier player will move in and secure that niche"
I've been reading how Apple won't survive, it will go out of business, no one will buy their products, etc. Of course now, over 30 years later, it just recently was the highest valued company on the planet and they are still in the top ten.
Every time there is some hiccup in their earnings or some other business launches to compete against them, out come all the doomsayers with the same old crap.
Give it a fucking rest. Apple is just as viable as any other big technology company. The Fan Boys you speak of are they ones who pine for Apple's failure day after day and for some reason feel slighted by its success.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Tablet computing was always perfectly plausible.
I guess it further illustrates your point that tablet sales and use are way down. They seem to be going away. I am not too sad to be honest.
Nowadays, laptops are so thin and light there is no reason to use a crippled product when you could have a real computer with all its extra use cases.
Android is so fragented it is frustrating for everyone. Carriers and Manufactureres are allowed to screw it up and Google does not care.
Pure android is awesome, the Crap that HTC and Samsung does to it makes it suck, then the carriers add on their crap to make it suck more.
Google needs to say, "NO" you ship a clean android and your add on crap is in the application world that CAN BE UNINSTALLED by the end user. They also need to demand that at least all updates to the OS be pushed to phones within 30 days of release, none of this bullshit like AT&T pulls with security updates showing 6-12 months later.
Please google Force these companies to stop making android a steaming turd.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I played with it a little when I got my new iPhone, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly.
I kind of look at it the same way I do those damned phone answering 'robots' when you call any company now, that require you to speak and talk to them, rather than just press a number through the directory.
I freakin' hate that...especially while in a crowded office, or maybe during the day while out and about. I'd rather just press a number, to pick what I want on the directory.
So, much I feel for talking to my phone....I'd rather not intrude on people around me, while I talk into my phone to "find xyz", or look up something. I just tend to type in my search strings silently while not interrupting those that may be around me....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
". . . 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.
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.
..don't panic
Like the alternatives are not doing the same. Really naive.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
I know a lot of you think the iPhone's introduction was like the second coming of Christ, but RIM/Blackberry increased in market share from 2007 to 2009 immediately after the iPhone was released. RIM's decline actually correlates closer with Android's rise in popularity.
The big losers in the early smartphone days were Nokia (Symbian was dated and badly needed an overhaul, which never happened) and Microsoft (who started off with a good lead from Windows Mobile on PDAs, but squandered it).
As for privacy, Apple has shown they're more than happy to violate their users' privacy when it's in their self-interest. When Apple ditched Google Maps, they didn't have their own database of SSID locations, so they couldn't locate you if you had the GPS turned off. The first year they paid for a wifi database from Skyhook. The next year, they used their own database. How did they mysteriously generate this database without sending around Apple street view cars to record the SSID and location of every hotspot on Earth like Google did? By secretly logging iPhone owners' locations and nearby SSIDs, and having the phones send the info back to them. Essentially, Apple turned all iPhone owners into unpaid contractors who scoured the Earth recording the locations of every SSID, and used a chunk of their data plan to transmit this data back to themselves.
The higher resolution screens aren't as necessary PC laptops because Windows uses subpixel rendering (MS calls it ClearType) to effectively triple the horizontal resolution of the screen.
While a nice technology modern screens render text much better using Apple's technique than most PC's with poor screens do. To quote yourself, most PC laptop text looks like "blurry crap" compared to Apple laptop screens. Even with ClearType...
On PC laptops, there are vent holes placed underneath the hottest parts, so fresh cool air contacts those parts first maximizing heat transfer to the air (heat transfer rate is proportional to temperature differential). Also, if you spill liquid into the laptop
Since you just said there are no vents on top of the Macbook, just how pray tell would the liquid get inside?
The bottom vents on the PC nicely let in liquid too you know, as it flows under a laptop. With a mac you don't have to worry if something flows under it.
As for the venting being inferior I can't see how that's true in reality, since the MacBooks I've used have all been comfortable on the lap and don't overhead.
You were aware that having a large metal body acts to dissipate heat much more efficiently than a plastic body with a few vents, right? Right??
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, the opposite is happening: Chinese (and others, like Amazon) companies are just forking Open-Source Android and slapping their own apps, app-stores etc. on top of it.
Support? Updates? Who cares, right?
You vastly overestimate the amount of influence Google has on what people do with Android. They have some influence on the source-code, of course - but once it's published, everybody can do with it whatever he wishes. And that's exactly what is happening now.
Also, as Google seems to come up with a new "winning" strategy for Android/ChromeOS every year, can you really blame any company for not getting resources behind this year's initiative (to be killed off next year)?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
How cute, anyone who says anything in defense of apple is now ostracized when such a blanket statement was made that's unsubstantiated by anything realistic. wonderful.
This is why I don't give two shits what other people think.
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