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The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what

The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings. Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data. Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he's nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple's secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.

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Roritharr 10y ago
> He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.
- bad_user 10y ago
  Well, if you're going to apply Occam's Razor, given that as a matter of fact most people don't give a shit about security or privacy, it's actually not in Apple's best interest to make this stand, at least when speaking short term, as it is negating them future revenue opportunities. And they aren't doing it only in their press releases, but in their products as well. I'd enumerate features of iOS or OS X that have been very well thought out in this regard, but that would make for a blog post.
- apozem 10y ago
  You can interpret public stances of principle as various ways of making money in the long term, but I do buy that Tim Cook cares about doing the right thing in some areas. > (An) NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable. What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader. https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rejects-politics-of-the-ncppr-suggests-group-sell-apples-s https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...
  - icebraining 10y ago
    If I wasn't aware enough about the US political landspace, reading that I'd be convinced that the NCPPR representative could only be a bad plot by Apple for PR. I mean, "commit to doing only those things that were profitable"? It's like asking if he plans to add "Darth" to his name.
    - mercurysmessage 10y ago
      Also, the Snowden leaks showed that all the major tech companies were in bed with the Us Govt.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- the_watcher 10y ago
  Occam's Razor actually tells you to take him at his word, as that is the simplest explanation. A major part of Occam's Razor is to eliminate the "read between the lines" gyrations that you're engaging in. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's a misapplication of the principle.
Spooky23 10y ago
AI is, like it was the first time around, a really speculative bet that will probably disappoint. IMO, Apple's approach is more honest and has a clear path to profitability. Everyone else is promising the world and not delivering much at all.
- ncallaway 10y ago
  This is the truly hard thing with disruptive innovation. It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    We'll see. Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too. Apple can provide most of the consumer services on the devices without external services. There's a risk that they cannot execute, but there's a real risk to the Google approach too -- swaths of the business can be wiped out by regulatory action.
    - ncallaway 10y ago
      > Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too. Yes, I apologize if I wasn't clear. My point was that it's hard to see what is disruptive technology and what is nothing. Plenty of things labelled as disruptive end up as nothing. Plenty of things labelled as nothing end up as disruptive. I was just saying it's never easy to tell which is which.
      - Spooky23 10y ago
        We violently agree on that. :) I'm a big fan of using machine learning to identify photos, etc. Google did it first on their cloud platform, and Apple is doing a pretty good job at it locally on iOS devices. I'm not a big fan of folks like the Watson marketing team telling me that my IoT fridge is going to replace my doctor and order a gallon of milk for me when I need it. As the Amazon experience with the dash has aptly demonstrated with paper towels that cost 30% more than Costco, that's a way to spend more money on junk!
jpalomaki 10y ago
I think Apple is making a mistake by taking the privacy first approach. I strongly believe people will be trading privacy for convenience and companies which shamelessly mine the customer data will win. This could also affect recruiting, since I assume it is more interesting to be working with AI projects in company like Facebook or Google where you have access to was amounts of customer information.
- 0xFFC 10y ago
  This comment may got down voted on HN, but it is reality in real world.
- Tepix 10y ago
  As time moves on, customers get more aware of the privacy implications of everything they do online. I think Apple is ahead of the pack. Google cannot follow them because it's against their business interest. I know plenty of people who do not trust Google and stay away from their products (including Android phones) as much as is feasible.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    The cost for Privacy is pretty big in terms of loss of convenience. If people really cared about it duckduckgo would be huge and gmail would have never gotten off the ground. Facebook would be a desert. Most people feel comfortable sharing and being a mostly open book. Only real privacy people care about is who gets to unlock their phone. Most people are lost in that their privacy is they are one flake in a snowstorm. I seriously had friends for year say "Don't put my kids on the internet." After a few years that all goes away due to the ease of sharing life with friends and families. So when people who own iPhone see Amazon's Alexia and their horrible Siri they buy the Echo from Amazon. Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy.
    - grzm 10y ago
      > Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy. In addition to Siri, what else would you put on the list of things made harder by Apple's privacy positions/implementations? (Edited for clarity.)
throwaway729 10y ago
> I don't know what Amazon does for AI They've always done a lot of consumer analytics. Also, Alexa. I think there's also a lot of AI going on in their logistics operations.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
A lot of people in the outskirt of the tech space (investors, analysts) is insisting on AI without really understanding capabilities. There's good money to be made in pushing existing analytics tech undo AI monikers and sell them repackaged.
Certhas 10y ago
Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share. The talk that Microsoft is irrelevant is a bit hilarious, given that they beat google on revenue and income last year. They have morphed from a company that is front and center to one that provides the infrastructure for the digital side of non-tech business. Microsoft Office is absolutely pervasive, and it's not going anywhere.
- floopidydoopidy 10y ago
  Like cancer.
  - sctb 10y ago
    Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all.
    - floopidydoopidy 10y ago
      There's nothing uncivil about similes. It's a valid criticism of a corrupt organization that uses your website like free advertising.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- nathas 10y ago
  > Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share. Source? Edit: Sorry, that was lazy of me. Googled: https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will-overtake-amazon-aws-infrastructure-service/ https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will... A bit of a biased source, "mspoweruser". Read a bit more.. We'll have to see how the offerings change or evolve in the next 5 years. Edit 2: https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/08/02/microsoft-behind-aws-in-cloud.aspx https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/08/02/microsoft-behind-aws-... AWS is still > 30% of the overall market, Azure hitting around ~9%.
the_watcher 10y ago
> It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. Google and Apple have beaten Microsoft at Windows, by offering better options in MacOS, iOS, and Android. Microsoft is trying (and to some extent succeeding) in catching up to AWS with Azure (look who is growing faster). And if you don't think that dominating the mp3 player market, which allowed for the launch of iTunes, directly leading to the iPhone and the App Store, was important, you didn't pay attention closely. Also, since the iPhone literally created a market and Android took about 2 years to really launch a competitor, it's pretty flawed to argue that they never beat anyone in market share.
the_watcher 10y ago
> I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them Alexa is easily the best voice assistant, at least in terms of actually understanding what is being asked. When it can't help, it's far more often because it can't find a result or because Amazon/the app builder hasn't built Alexa into the product yet (still drives me crazy that asking Alexa to play an HBO show only works with HBO Go, but not HBA Now, for example, but Alexa definitely understands the requests).
- aetherson 10y ago
  I don't know if Alexa is the "best" voice assistant, but up until Google Home ships (has it yet?) it's the "only" voice assistant in the place that voice assistants actually matter. It'll be interesting to see if Google overtakes the Echo. I'm not a fan of Google's "no apps" approach.
  - the_watcher 10y ago
    I agree, I don't know if it's the best. I just know that it recognizes the words I say to it better than any other I have used, oftentimes without needing to speak in the artificially clear voice that most tend to associate with voice control.
  - wstrange 10y ago
    It looks like Google will allow app integration with the Google Assistant: https://developers.google.com/actions/ https://developers.google.com/actions/
    - aetherson 10y ago
      Maybe. Of some kind. Starting in December.
  - theptip 10y ago
    Here's Tim O'Reilly making the case that Alexa is in a different class (from a UX perspective) than Google or Apple's AI assistants: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-would-alexa-do-tim-o-reilly https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-would-alexa-do-tim-o-rei... I think the point about Alexa's great interactivity coming from having to build for a device with no screen is a strong one. Though I think that the best AI-driven UIs in the future will have to bridge the gap and be able to display content usefully on a screen (or many screens), while also preserving that concept of knowing what the current context is (i.e. "skip" means "skip the track" if I have music playing, but might refer to a different app if I have youtube running).
empath75 10y ago
> I don't know what Amazon does for AI A lot of people are running their AI stacks on aws.
- lucasmullens 10y ago
  That doesn't really help them compete in the AI space.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    Do they get access to info on how you're using AWS? As in, could they be learning about the perfect stack, hardware/VM optimisations and technologies used in order to jump into the market with a broad knowledge of the current state of the art? Edit: I guess they don't get any information on success measures, but still, would be interesting if metadata would help them hit the ground running.
DavidWanjiru 10y ago
It seems to me the comparison being made between Ballmer and Cook is not in their characters, but in similarities between the directions their companies take under a comparable set of circumstances.
roymurdock 10y ago
> I don't know what Amazon does for AI The Alexa/echo ecosystem. > However it's tough to beat Google in this space...they also have a lot of data on users... Agreed, the amount of data is key. This is where Apple will struggle when looking to upgrade Siri/AI capabilities in coming years. > Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot Privacy and security (and, secondarily, a full physical keyboard) was Blackberry's key differentiator before they lost to the touchscreen-enabled iPhone app ecosystem. Now that competitor's offerings are becoming more powerful (hardware) and refined (software), and the smartphone market is close to saturation in advanced economies, Apple needs a non-technical differentiator. Security/privacy is the perfect talking point. I have no reason to believe that Tim Cook is acting in the interest of users ("a man with principles") while marketing Apple products as private and secure; rather, he is acting in the interest of shareholders, as he should be given that he is the CEO of a public company. Happily, user and shareholder interests seem to be mostly aligned at the moment - Apple can sell more phones if people trust the brand. If it makes more financial sense in the future to ditch user privacy (in order to get closer with Facebook & Microsoft so as to compete with Google), he probably will. But don't expect to hear an announcement about it until the info is leaked. It's impossible to truly discern the character of a public company's CEO because they are always acting, and tons of things happen within their organizations without their knowledge.
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  I disagree. Apple's stance on privacy has everything to do with the personality and life experiences of Tim Cook. Stop for a moment to imagine what being a homosexual teenager in 1970's Alabama was like. Also it's well known that his career at IBM was torpedoed over a gay "glass ceiling." Tim Cook is a man who understands that privacy is a human right.
  - roymurdock 10y ago
    Maybe. I don't know Tim Cook personally, so I'm in no position to judge his character. I'd like to believe his case for privacy is a moral one, grounded in his own challenging personal experiences. That would certainly be refreshing. What I do know for a fact is that he is the CEO of a public company, and as such he has a duty to maximize shareholder value. This isn't a judgement of his character, it's simply a description of his job. I believe he is very capable of performing his job.
WayneBro 10y ago
> ...he's nothing like Steve Ballmer... Your response was also short on details with regards to your major point, quoted above. Meanwhile, here are the points from the article. Like Ballmer, Tim Cook: - is an executor, not a visionary. - doubled revenue while also doubling profit for his company. - announced very few new products. - has the same kinds of challenges (facing disruption). - lacks passion for the product. - takes things personally.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  > announced very few new products. Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil. These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products (in the blue ocean sense) as seem to be defined in the article. This is the complaint the article makes with "execution" executives. As products they're all mechanisms for increasing revenues on existing (re: stagnant) products instead of creating completely new product lines that reflect the changes in the market.
    - eyelidlessness 10y ago
      > These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products Some much more than others. If you apply this logic consistently, the only new products Steve Jobs introduced were the original Apple (II), the Mac operating systems, the iPod and iOS. Everything else was an iteration, right?
      - iakh 10y ago
        These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization
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ben_jones 10y ago
"A man with principles" TM. Do we really know the content of people's characters based solely on what we hear in tech blogs and popular media? Was superior security/privacy/whatever not a selling point for Apple since "lol Mac's don't get viruses"? I'm not saying Tim Cook is bad, I'm just saying how do we know billionaire execs with PR teams and heavy financial incentives to seem good are in fact good? Did this not bite people in the ass with Holmes?
wahsd 10y ago
Apple has a chance to really essentially poach away people if they could come up with a system of social media and search and email that offers privacy and security at least in the private sector. I would pay a certain amount to use a social media network, email, and search capability that was not open to monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I think people, in their foolishness abdicated the internet to the siren's song of "free" back in the early aughts and we have been suffering the consequences ever since. I know there are solutions to the kind of centralized power and control and surveillance the both Google and Facebook represent. We CAN create social networks and have search without tracking. It's just that few with the clout have tried to overcome the hurdles and the network effect. I think society is ripe for a shift to a different kind of digital life that is not a dystopian surveillance state. Apple could do that and fully integrate with their phones if they wanted to. It could even open up a whole different market for marketing and commerce, not by tracking, surveilling, and monitoring; but by self-selection, offering, and selling. What Facebook did was just lazy, as all authoritarian, totalitarian surveillance dystopian regimes are.
pessimizer 10y ago
> Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data. This is a tech industry shibboleth. Internet search is not particularly good for anyone, and it was better for power users when it wasn't much more than web-grep. Google's innovation was to count the links pointing to a page in order to determine its quality, and once Google became dominant, that technique had been gamed enough to be virtually useless. As far as I can tell, the only algorithmic improvements they've had since then have been net negatives for one's ability to search for things that they haven't searched for before, and the only effective improvements have been from manual tweaking to weed out content farms. Every search I make on Google brings up the same 80 companies that choose to spend most of their effort on SEO, but actually have a business (usually selling me something) rather than copying low-quality content. Google's image search has aggressively gotten materially worse. They've gotten so desperate for improvements that they've been systematically dismantling ethical barriers in order to squeeze out a few more dollars. I have no idea what product establishes Google as significantly ahead of anyone in AI. They're all just a day ahead of some mathematician who has a sudden insight over her first coffee of the morning. In this, Tim Cook isn't missing anything other than a slight increase in the probability that that mathematician will be working at Apple that morning rather at than the University of Arkansas.

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Roritharr 10y ago

> He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.

bad_user 10y ago
Well, if you're going to apply Occam's Razor, given that as a matter of fact most people don't give a shit about security or privacy, it's actually not in Apple's best interest to make this stand, at least when speaking short term, as it is negating them future revenue opportunities. And they aren't doing it only in their press releases, but in their products as well. I'd enumerate features of iOS or OS X that have been very well thought out in this regard, but that would make for a blog post.
apozem 10y ago
You can interpret public stances of principle as various ways of making money in the long term, but I do buy that Tim Cook cares about doing the right thing in some areas. > (An) NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable. What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues. "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader. https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rejects-politics-of-the-ncppr-suggests-group-sell-apples-s https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...
- icebraining 10y ago
  If I wasn't aware enough about the US political landspace, reading that I'd be convinced that the NCPPR representative could only be a bad plot by Apple for PR. I mean, "commit to doing only those things that were profitable"? It's like asking if he plans to add "Darth" to his name.
  - mercurysmessage 10y ago
    Also, the Snowden leaks showed that all the major tech companies were in bed with the Us Govt.
deleted 10y ago
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the_watcher 10y ago
Occam's Razor actually tells you to take him at his word, as that is the simplest explanation. A major part of Occam's Razor is to eliminate the "read between the lines" gyrations that you're engaging in. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's a misapplication of the principle.

Spooky23 10y ago

AI is, like it was the first time around, a really speculative bet that will probably disappoint. IMO, Apple's approach is more honest and has a clear path to profitability. Everyone else is promising the world and not delivering much at all.

ncallaway 10y ago
This is the truly hard thing with disruptive innovation. It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  We'll see. Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too. Apple can provide most of the consumer services on the devices without external services. There's a risk that they cannot execute, but there's a real risk to the Google approach too -- swaths of the business can be wiped out by regulatory action.
  - ncallaway 10y ago
    > Sometimes it's a bunch of hype and horseshit too. Yes, I apologize if I wasn't clear. My point was that it's hard to see what is disruptive technology and what is nothing. Plenty of things labelled as disruptive end up as nothing. Plenty of things labelled as nothing end up as disruptive. I was just saying it's never easy to tell which is which.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      We violently agree on that. :) I'm a big fan of using machine learning to identify photos, etc. Google did it first on their cloud platform, and Apple is doing a pretty good job at it locally on iOS devices. I'm not a big fan of folks like the Watson marketing team telling me that my IoT fridge is going to replace my doctor and order a gallon of milk for me when I need it. As the Amazon experience with the dash has aptly demonstrated with paper towels that cost 30% more than Costco, that's a way to spend more money on junk!

jpalomaki 10y ago

I think Apple is making a mistake by taking the privacy first approach. I strongly believe people will be trading privacy for convenience and companies which shamelessly mine the customer data will win. This could also affect recruiting, since I assume it is more interesting to be working with AI projects in company like Facebook or Google where you have access to was amounts of customer information.

0xFFC 10y ago
This comment may got down voted on HN, but it is reality in real world.
Tepix 10y ago
As time moves on, customers get more aware of the privacy implications of everything they do online. I think Apple is ahead of the pack. Google cannot follow them because it's against their business interest. I know plenty of people who do not trust Google and stay away from their products (including Android phones) as much as is feasible.
- baldfat 10y ago
  The cost for Privacy is pretty big in terms of loss of convenience. If people really cared about it duckduckgo would be huge and gmail would have never gotten off the ground. Facebook would be a desert. Most people feel comfortable sharing and being a mostly open book. Only real privacy people care about is who gets to unlock their phone. Most people are lost in that their privacy is they are one flake in a snowstorm. I seriously had friends for year say "Don't put my kids on the internet." After a few years that all goes away due to the ease of sharing life with friends and families. So when people who own iPhone see Amazon's Alexia and their horrible Siri they buy the Echo from Amazon. Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy.
  - grzm 10y ago
    > Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy. In addition to Siri, what else would you put on the list of things made harder by Apple's privacy positions/implementations? (Edited for clarity.)

throwaway729 10y ago

> I don't know what Amazon does for AI They've always done a lot of consumer analytics. Also, Alexa. I think there's also a lot of AI going on in their logistics operations.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

A lot of people in the outskirt of the tech space (investors, analysts) is insisting on AI without really understanding capabilities. There's good money to be made in pushing existing analytics tech undo AI monikers and sell them repackaged.

Certhas 10y ago

Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share. The talk that Microsoft is irrelevant is a bit hilarious, given that they beat google on revenue and income last year. They have morphed from a company that is front and center to one that provides the infrastructure for the digital side of non-tech business. Microsoft Office is absolutely pervasive, and it's not going anywhere.

floopidydoopidy 10y ago
Like cancer.
- sctb 10y ago
  Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all.
  - floopidydoopidy 10y ago
    There's nothing uncivil about similes. It's a valid criticism of a corrupt organization that uses your website like free advertising.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
nathas 10y ago
> Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share. Source? Edit: Sorry, that was lazy of me. Googled: https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will-overtake-amazon-aws-infrastructure-service/ https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will... A bit of a biased source, "mspoweruser". Read a bit more.. We'll have to see how the offerings change or evolve in the next 5 years. Edit 2: https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/08/02/microsoft-behind-aws-in-cloud.aspx https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/08/02/microsoft-behind-aws-... AWS is still > 30% of the overall market, Azure hitting around ~9%.

the_watcher 10y ago

> It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. Google and Apple have beaten Microsoft at Windows, by offering better options in MacOS, iOS, and Android. Microsoft is trying (and to some extent succeeding) in catching up to AWS with Azure (look who is growing faster). And if you don't think that dominating the mp3 player market, which allowed for the launch of iTunes, directly leading to the iPhone and the App Store, was important, you didn't pay attention closely. Also, since the iPhone literally created a market and Android took about 2 years to really launch a competitor, it's pretty flawed to argue that they never beat anyone in market share.

the_watcher 10y ago

> I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them Alexa is easily the best voice assistant, at least in terms of actually understanding what is being asked. When it can't help, it's far more often because it can't find a result or because Amazon/the app builder hasn't built Alexa into the product yet (still drives me crazy that asking Alexa to play an HBO show only works with HBO Go, but not HBA Now, for example, but Alexa definitely understands the requests).

aetherson 10y ago
I don't know if Alexa is the "best" voice assistant, but up until Google Home ships (has it yet?) it's the "only" voice assistant in the place that voice assistants actually matter. It'll be interesting to see if Google overtakes the Echo. I'm not a fan of Google's "no apps" approach.
- the_watcher 10y ago
  I agree, I don't know if it's the best. I just know that it recognizes the words I say to it better than any other I have used, oftentimes without needing to speak in the artificially clear voice that most tend to associate with voice control.
- wstrange 10y ago
  It looks like Google will allow app integration with the Google Assistant: https://developers.google.com/actions/ https://developers.google.com/actions/
  - aetherson 10y ago
    Maybe. Of some kind. Starting in December.
- theptip 10y ago
  Here's Tim O'Reilly making the case that Alexa is in a different class (from a UX perspective) than Google or Apple's AI assistants: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-would-alexa-do-tim-o-reilly https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-would-alexa-do-tim-o-rei... I think the point about Alexa's great interactivity coming from having to build for a device with no screen is a strong one. Though I think that the best AI-driven UIs in the future will have to bridge the gap and be able to display content usefully on a screen (or many screens), while also preserving that concept of knowing what the current context is (i.e. "skip" means "skip the track" if I have music playing, but might refer to a different app if I have youtube running).

empath75 10y ago

> I don't know what Amazon does for AI A lot of people are running their AI stacks on aws.

lucasmullens 10y ago
That doesn't really help them compete in the AI space.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  Do they get access to info on how you're using AWS? As in, could they be learning about the perfect stack, hardware/VM optimisations and technologies used in order to jump into the market with a broad knowledge of the current state of the art? Edit: I guess they don't get any information on success measures, but still, would be interesting if metadata would help them hit the ground running.

DavidWanjiru 10y ago

It seems to me the comparison being made between Ballmer and Cook is not in their characters, but in similarities between the directions their companies take under a comparable set of circumstances.

roymurdock 10y ago

> I don't know what Amazon does for AI The Alexa/echo ecosystem. > However it's tough to beat Google in this space...they also have a lot of data on users... Agreed, the amount of data is key. This is where Apple will struggle when looking to upgrade Siri/AI capabilities in coming years. > Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot Privacy and security (and, secondarily, a full physical keyboard) was Blackberry's key differentiator before they lost to the touchscreen-enabled iPhone app ecosystem. Now that competitor's offerings are becoming more powerful (hardware) and refined (software), and the smartphone market is close to saturation in advanced economies, Apple needs a non-technical differentiator. Security/privacy is the perfect talking point. I have no reason to believe that Tim Cook is acting in the interest of users ("a man with principles") while marketing Apple products as private and secure; rather, he is acting in the interest of shareholders, as he should be given that he is the CEO of a public company. Happily, user and shareholder interests seem to be mostly aligned at the moment - Apple can sell more phones if people trust the brand. If it makes more financial sense in the future to ditch user privacy (in order to get closer with Facebook & Microsoft so as to compete with Google), he probably will. But don't expect to hear an announcement about it until the info is leaked. It's impossible to truly discern the character of a public company's CEO because they are always acting, and tons of things happen within their organizations without their knowledge.

Eric_WVGG 10y ago
I disagree. Apple's stance on privacy has everything to do with the personality and life experiences of Tim Cook. Stop for a moment to imagine what being a homosexual teenager in 1970's Alabama was like. Also it's well known that his career at IBM was torpedoed over a gay "glass ceiling." Tim Cook is a man who understands that privacy is a human right.
- roymurdock 10y ago
  Maybe. I don't know Tim Cook personally, so I'm in no position to judge his character. I'd like to believe his case for privacy is a moral one, grounded in his own challenging personal experiences. That would certainly be refreshing. What I do know for a fact is that he is the CEO of a public company, and as such he has a duty to maximize shareholder value. This isn't a judgement of his character, it's simply a description of his job. I believe he is very capable of performing his job.

WayneBro 10y ago

> ...he's nothing like Steve Ballmer... Your response was also short on details with regards to your major point, quoted above. Meanwhile, here are the points from the article. Like Ballmer, Tim Cook: - is an executor, not a visionary. - doubled revenue while also doubling profit for his company. - announced very few new products. - has the same kinds of challenges (facing disruption). - lacks passion for the product. - takes things personally.

intoverflow2 10y ago
> announced very few new products. Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil. These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products (in the blue ocean sense) as seem to be defined in the article. This is the complaint the article makes with "execution" executives. As products they're all mechanisms for increasing revenues on existing (re: stagnant) products instead of creating completely new product lines that reflect the changes in the market.
  - eyelidlessness 10y ago
    > These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products Some much more than others. If you apply this logic consistently, the only new products Steve Jobs introduced were the original Apple (II), the Mac operating systems, the iPod and iOS. Everything else was an iteration, right?
    - iakh 10y ago
      These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization

deleted 10y ago

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ben_jones 10y ago

"A man with principles" TM. Do we really know the content of people's characters based solely on what we hear in tech blogs and popular media? Was superior security/privacy/whatever not a selling point for Apple since "lol Mac's don't get viruses"? I'm not saying Tim Cook is bad, I'm just saying how do we know billionaire execs with PR teams and heavy financial incentives to seem good are in fact good? Did this not bite people in the ass with Holmes?

wahsd 10y ago

Apple has a chance to really essentially poach away people if they could come up with a system of social media and search and email that offers privacy and security at least in the private sector. I would pay a certain amount to use a social media network, email, and search capability that was not open to monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I think people, in their foolishness abdicated the internet to the siren's song of "free" back in the early aughts and we have been suffering the consequences ever since. I know there are solutions to the kind of centralized power and control and surveillance the both Google and Facebook represent. We CAN create social networks and have search without tracking. It's just that few with the clout have tried to overcome the hurdles and the network effect. I think society is ripe for a shift to a different kind of digital life that is not a dystopian surveillance state. Apple could do that and fully integrate with their phones if they wanted to. It could even open up a whole different market for marketing and commerce, not by tracking, surveilling, and monitoring; but by self-selection, offering, and selling. What Facebook did was just lazy, as all authoritarian, totalitarian surveillance dystopian regimes are.

pessimizer 10y ago

> Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data. This is a tech industry shibboleth. Internet search is not particularly good for anyone, and it was better for power users when it wasn't much more than web-grep. Google's innovation was to count the links pointing to a page in order to determine its quality, and once Google became dominant, that technique had been gamed enough to be virtually useless. As far as I can tell, the only algorithmic improvements they've had since then have been net negatives for one's ability to search for things that they haven't searched for before, and the only effective improvements have been from manual tweaking to weed out content farms. Every search I make on Google brings up the same 80 companies that choose to spend most of their effort on SEO, but actually have a business (usually selling me something) rather than copying low-quality content. Google's image search has aggressively gotten materially worse. They've gotten so desperate for improvements that they've been systematically dismantling ethical barriers in order to squeeze out a few more dollars. I have no idea what product establishes Google as significantly ahead of anyone in AI. They're all just a day ahead of some mathematician who has a sudden insight over her first coffee of the morning. In this, Tim Cook isn't missing anything other than a slight increase in the probability that that mathematician will be working at Apple that morning rather at than the University of Arkansas.