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Apple is about to become much less significant in the consumer electronics business.
The notion that Apple (AAPL) is in decline is not even controversial anymore. Many longtime Apple proponents have made comparisons to Blackberry (BBRY). The Canadian company excelled at a couple of skills, and its executives could not imagine a world where those attributes were less valuable.
So Blackberry pressed on with its secure messaging and clunky physical keyboards, while Apple’s iPhone gobbled up mindshare with touch screens and a re-imagined user-experience. In the end, those well-intentioned-but-misguided Canucks never saw it coming.
Times change. Apple is in the midst of being blindsided itself by cloud-based, artificially intelligent assistants. They’re the future — and the rest of the technology world has been ramping up for a while — building out data centers, open-sourcing software tools and perfecting consumer-facing software.
Amazon (AMZN) has Alexa, Microsoft (MSFT) has Cortana, Facebook (FB) has M, startup Viv Labs has Viv and Google (GOOGL) has Assistant. Because these AI assistants live in the cloud, they’re both portable and infinitely powerful. They’re also platforms unto themselves with the potential to become ubiquitous.
Apple’s AI foray, Siri, was supposed to get a big makeover for its Worldwide Developers Conference this week. It was supposed to make her competitive. It didn’t work out that way.
Siri still doesn’t live in the cloud. By design, she lives on the device and has never risen above being more than a feature on a platform. Apple executives, especially CEO Tim Cook, argue that’s a good thing because it protects privacy. The shortcomings are Siri is neither portable nor scalable.
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For example, the Siri user experience on iPhone is much different than on Apple Watch, Apple TV or on Mac because they’re not connected in any way other than branding. Siri’s function is fully determined by the compute power of the device, and worse, it’s in a silo. This puts her at a huge disadvantage to her cloud-based AI competitors, which harness the immense capability of tens of thousands of servers.
Siri will never be capable of answering complex questions or using context, and conversations are completely out of the question. So she compensates for her lack of understanding with trademark snark. While it’s cute in a sophomoric sort of way, it’s probably not a longer-term winning strategy. After all, you don’t hire assistants because they’re snarky. At some point they have to be able to do the job.
And that’s the larger point. Apple hasn’t given Siri any of the tools to succeed because despite all evidence to the contrary, executives can’t imagine a world where consumers value ubiquitous, truly smart assistants and the new user-experience that they bring over their own sleek devices. That’s a big bet given the state of artificial intelligence in 2016.
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Google Assistant, for example, skims all of your Google services for ways to help you track appointments, parcels, flights and hotel bookings, sports scores, stock prices, traffic on your morning commute and more. It builds a briefing page, only accessible by you, that lives on all of your devices across platforms. And soon these services will move to Google Home and Android Auto where they will get powerful conversational language processing. We’re entering an era where you can tell your computer what to do and expect the task to be completed.
Apple became a consumer-electronics titan because it correctly saw touch as the next computing paradigm. In tandem with Google, it won. Yet times change. By most accounts, the next paradigm shift is artificial intelligence and voice. Apple is not built to compete in that new paradigm. See you on the other side. GOOGL and AMZN remain among the best bets for the AI generation, with Facebook not far behind.
Best wishes,
Jon Markman
{ 9 comments }
Argument about Siri is true today but one must remember that Apple has never been a leader in technology development. It has waited for others to get the basic framework in place and then integrated it in a truly consumer friendly fashion. AI Siri is probably a generation away when it does become the privacy issues are resolved and the cloud issues are fully linked into the i-cloud software.
Your insightful comment(s) are historically correct. Apple has always excelled in integrating existing technology (hardware & software) into a more intuitively user friendly experience for a more human-kind-like-use. This is their Genius, and goes to prove the old adage: “All can appreciate quality, but few can define it.” As long as Apple continues to define quality better than anyone else, they will continue to be rewarded in the market place accordingly.
Nice to see Apple going down their equipment is way too expensive anyway
Thank you John for the insightful overview.
Interesting article very well written.
The acceleration of AI applications and capabilities over the next 20 years will utterly transform cultures and economies, and probably engender not a few Luddite reactions, particularly as it increasingly impacts the automation of repetitive tasks heretofore done by human labor, physical and intellectual, with a far greater ability to data-map every human being. It will not be the first time the tools invented by humans outstripped their ability to cope with the economic and cultural changes, but this time humans will be in direct competition for survival with the tools of their own making, or at the very least victims of a highly evolved surveillance environment driven by rapid advances in Big Data (China being a template). To paraphrase Game of Thrones with a nod to the Terminator movies: SkyNet is coming…now hand me that phone!
Thus far I have managed to stay the hell out of the Cloud, which I view as the end of privacy. In computers, hackers always find a way to win. The rush to the cloud is terrifying to me.
I enjoyed the article but i think that the privacy issue will not be so easily ‘solved’ and the ‘choice’ to remain off the cloud will remain viable and valuable for a long time…right now it seems like the hackers continue to leap over every privacy ‘solution’ that has been implemented. The importance of privacy and security is Real to many!… i’m not eager to learn mandarin . So don’t comply too quick Apple!
Very little individual thinking anymore; just push ‘this and that’ new button or the old button;
wonder what this button does? Why not drop this little distracting tool itself and pay attention to the world around us …
I hate being micromanaged by those + and – charges …