6 ms·

I've thought this for awhile, and have seen other articles about it. While Amazon and Microsoft seem to be executing well on their respective visions, Google,

by nwah1 8y ago

I've thought this for awhile, and have seen other articles about it. While Amazon and Microsoft seem to be executing well on their respective visions, Google, Apple, and Facebook all seem asleep at the wheel. Nothing gamechanging from any of them, lots of scandals and user complaints piling up. There's nothing unusual about it. Big companies usually go this route. It is frankly amazing when they don't.

siquick 8y ago
Apple is the most valuable company in history and the new focus on privacy is going to win them even more loyalty.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Their products aren't compelling anymore -- they're living off the momentum of prior greatness. As soon as someone else has a compelling, exclusive phone feature, Apple's likely to collapse. A lot (LOT) of their product demand is from fickle customers that would leave them quite easily. There's no lock in, and there's no reason to be loyal -- it's a fashion brand. As for privacy, I think you'd have to show that those customers don't have facebook accounts to take that seriously.
  - mario0b1 8y ago
    Maybe some time will come where they go from fashion-only-brand to consumer and/or budget brand? Sure it could hurt their image, but if they keep going into that privacy direction it could possibly give them A LOT more customers, who just can't (or don't want to) afford apple right now.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      If their fat margins collapse, so does their market cap.
      - nielsbot 8y ago
        innovate or die.. it's an honest way to go
  - nwah1 8y ago
    There is heavy lock-in with Apple, moreso than any other company I can think of. But for sure it is a fashion brand. But in order to be fashionable, they need to have compelling designs and technology. They do not anymore. Their main new product seems to be those stupid AirPods, and I don't think you can carry a trillion dollar company on that. Everything else is just a minor tweak on an existing product.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      I don't know about that. You have some connectors and adapters, but most people's investments are online instead of in long lived hardware. Maybe some Mac apps? But most users are primarily on Safari and iTunes. Hardly locked in?
  - shafyy 8y ago
    Yes, their smartphones and Macbooks are not innovating at the pace that they used to. But so aren't Google's, Microsoft's, Samsung's and all other PC/Smartphone company's. The reason for that is that PCs and smartphones are plateauing as a computing platform. I'm super curious to see what Apple's game for VR and AR headsets will be. Currently, Oculus/FB is leading the race there.
    - p2t2p 8y ago
      Well, at least I can plug an external GPU into latest MacBook Pro. Can’t do it with latest Surface - not T3 ports.
  - nopzor 8y ago
    There is lock in to the wider ecosystem beyond a particular phone feature, eg. iMessage, iTunes, HomePod, etc. Plus, apple has a huge lead in CPU and GPU performance and this is only accelerating, paving the way for future potential phone features imo.
  - matwood 8y ago
    > Their products aren't compelling anymore -- they're living off the momentum of prior greatness. Not compelling relative to what? People have been saying this about Apple with respect to the original iPhone X (which sold a very large amount), the Apple Watch, and even the iPad which they managed to bring sales back up as the rest of the tablet industry floundered. > As soon as someone else has a compelling, exclusive phone feature, Apple's likely to collapse. Your biases show through when you talk about a company with the resources of Apple collapsing because of one exclusive phone feature. In reality, Apple's biggest challenge is competing against last years iPhone. > There's no lock in, and there's no reason to be loyal -- it's a fashion brand. Again, your biases. For many people iOS is the easiest mobile OS to use. It has it's quirks, but for many people it just works.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      > Not compelling relative to what? To desktops and laptops that offer more RAM/CPU/GPU per buck while costing much less. > For many people iOS is the easiest mobile OS to use. If they can afford it. Not so easy when earning 500 euros or less per month.
      - p2t2p 8y ago
        I lived in Latvia for one year. Median salary - 370. Lots of people with iPhones. Not her latests iPhones but lots of people. Funny thing - there was a great divide - the biggest amount of dumbphones I’ve ever seen since iPhone introduction and yet, lot and lots of iPhones.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        It would be interesting to correlate if they were new or 2nd hand, alongside the owner's income.
      - xvector 8y ago
        > To desktops and laptops that offer more RAM/CPU/GPU per buck while costing much less. This is not why people buy Macs, and it hasn't been in a long time. If anything, Macs are closer to giving performance/$ than they usually ever have. People by Macs for aesthetic and usability. The vast majority of the population does not care "how many gigahertz their RAM has", and Mac sales reflect this.
- thrower123 8y ago
  > the new focus on privacy is going to win them even more loyalty. This seems to be a common talking point, but I'm not convinced it is a real driver outside of a small niche of within the niche of software people. Privacy is not something regular people really are aware of or give a damn about. The biggest driver towards getting an iPhone that I see is shutting up friends who whine because you're a "green person" in their iMessage.
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    The privacy aspect is what has, and will continue to be why the iphone is the preferred phone for businesses and governments that give their employees a smartphone. This was a big factor as to why blackberry's phone business didn't die sooner than it did.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    Apple have an edge over its competitors because they can afford to go full-on tinfoil with privacy; it wouldn’t put a dent in their business model. And while laypeople today care little about privacy, Apple can bring it into the collective consciousness. All it takes is a good meme (in the original Dawkins sense, not in the image-macro sense). A meme that tells people: “only the poor can’t afford privacy”. If they can get this into people’s heads then they’ll demand privacy, because nobody likes feeling poor.
    - sdenton4 8y ago
      That causality assertion is hard to prove... Maybe true for you, may or may not be true generally.
  - fmajid 8y ago
    I would have agreed with you about apathy in the general population, but The Information had an interesting data point a week ago: "According to a Pew Research Center study, 26% of Facebook users in the U.S. have deleted the app entirely and 74% have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months. User growth on Facebook is slowing." So there is hope after all.
  - 8y ago
- ArchTypical 8y ago
  > Apple is the most valuable company in history That's a belief. > the new focus on privacy I see a trend here.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
  Apple isn't "the most valuable company in history" it just has the highest market cap of a public company in the USA right now.
  - ianwalter 8y ago
    What is the most valuable company in history? What company in the world has a higher market value than Apple?
    - afthonos 8y ago
      Saudi Aramco is somewhere in the 1.2-2T area: https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-aramco-may-have-to-settle-for-just-a-trillion-or-so https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-a...
      - ianwalter 8y ago
        Thats not a publicly traded company though right? My point being “it just has the highest market cap of a public company in the USA right now” is misleading.
    - Naga 8y ago
      The hard part is that nominally Apple is the most valuable, because it has the highest market value, but of course that doesn't take into consideration inflation. I think the general consensus is that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the most valuable. Excuse the below clickbait article, but it was the first result when I searched: https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/how-rich-was-the-dutch-east-india-company/ https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/how-rich-was-the-dut...
      - ianwalter 8y ago
        But like the parent comment said, thats market cap, not value. Value isn’t market cap because the market is irrational and VOC is a perfect example of that.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Outside of US and other first world countries they are not. Not everyone across the globe has salaries to pay for privacy features.
lallysingh 8y ago
Google + Facebook both grew out of singular products that kept making lots of money without requiring further deep investment -- just scaling, maintenence, and filling in feature gaps. They grew to keep investors happy about them having only one cash cow. They don't know how to do that. I'd prefer Google stay its old self and they make Alphabet the primary growth vehicle. But people need to show impact to get promoted, so you can't very well leave a good product alone. So now they have the mess of an organization they have now. The management angle from the article is interesting. Google originally didn't want management and there has always been a "necessary evil" attitude towards it there. So management was given an unexpected free pass on being evil. They weren't required to Googley and got hired from other places that were distinctly not so (e.g., IBM).
dswalter 8y ago
Google is heavily investing in cloud; in 2015 they embarked on a sizable shift, where they decided it was worth using their considerable head starts in databases and machine learning. They open-sourced Kubernetes and Tensorflow that year, both with a view toward cannibalizing AWS's lead. They released Apache Beam the following year, but it hasn't caught on the same way. At this point, Kubernetes is winning everywhere, so why not use Google's infrastructure for it? , and tensorflow has enough adoption that you might go to Google Cloud just because they integrate so tightly with it. More recently, Google purchased Kaggle, and has turned Jupyter notebooks into Colab, as well as hiring Jake VanDerPlas out of UW. They're trying to turn GCP as the easy, first choice solution for running and versioning your darn notebooks. But if you're already there, why not use BigTable to pull the data INTO the notebooks...? There are definitely tone-deaf steps they're taking, but Google is building serious advantages into their cloud offerings.
- rhodysurf 8y ago
  Not to mention Firebase and everything that goes with it
icebraining 8y ago
I frankly don't see the difference; all of them seem pretty similar to me, with large bets on unproven tech (hololens, waymo), trying to cash in on enterprise and developers (Office 365+Azure, GSuite+GCloud). And saying that MS is executing well when just three days ago they had to pull a Windows update due a data loss bug that passed their QA seems funny.
- nwah1 8y ago
  Microsoft is putting out compelling products and has the #2 cloud platform and fastest growing cloud platform. They have lots of developer momentum with VS Code, Typescript, .NET Core, etc. Their recent acquisitions make sense, mostly, unlike some of their rivals. I don't like either Amazon or Microsoft, but from a business angle they are both impressive. They are both at risk of going off the rails at any point, but I have much more respect for Bezos and Nadella than anyone at Facebook, Google, or Apple.
askafriend 8y ago
While you've been asleep in bed at home, Apple have built an insane services business and scaled the iPhone to heights no one could have predicted. Not only that but they quietly made the Apple Watch and AirPods a force of culture, made huge strides with their iPad lineup and have nailed the execution on all three which only feeds value back into the overall Apple ecosystem. It's no longer about any single product anymore, though the iPhone still is the 800 pound Gorilla of the product lineup and the obvious lynchpin tying everything together. But there is also Apple Music, iCloud, The App Store, Apple Pay and huge investments into AR, ML, Privacy, and a whole host of developer APIs. You're missing the forest for the trees of why Apple is able to make such _deep_ inroads into peoples lives and get them to pay top dollar for it at scale (50mm iPhones are made and shipped every quarter). And don't forget all the strides they've made in retail with their Apple Stores. Don't forget the insane chips their chip design team has been pumping out every year. Don't forget their acquisition of Beats and going head to head with Spotify. It's easy to take all this progress for granted. As a beloved consumer business, they're firing on all cylinders as far as I'm concerned. They'll make mistakes from time to fine and that's ok (iOS 11, AirPower, Mac Pro) - but you've got to ignore quite a lot of progress to make such a strong claim that they're asleep at the wheel - they are decidedly not asleep at the wheel by any measure.

by nwah1 8y ago

siquick 8y ago

Apple is the most valuable company in history and the new focus on privacy is going to win them even more loyalty.

lallysingh 8y ago
Their products aren't compelling anymore -- they're living off the momentum of prior greatness. As soon as someone else has a compelling, exclusive phone feature, Apple's likely to collapse. A lot (LOT) of their product demand is from fickle customers that would leave them quite easily. There's no lock in, and there's no reason to be loyal -- it's a fashion brand. As for privacy, I think you'd have to show that those customers don't have facebook accounts to take that seriously.
- mario0b1 8y ago
  Maybe some time will come where they go from fashion-only-brand to consumer and/or budget brand? Sure it could hurt their image, but if they keep going into that privacy direction it could possibly give them A LOT more customers, who just can't (or don't want to) afford apple right now.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    If their fat margins collapse, so does their market cap.
    - nielsbot 8y ago
      innovate or die.. it's an honest way to go
- nwah1 8y ago
  There is heavy lock-in with Apple, moreso than any other company I can think of. But for sure it is a fashion brand. But in order to be fashionable, they need to have compelling designs and technology. They do not anymore. Their main new product seems to be those stupid AirPods, and I don't think you can carry a trillion dollar company on that. Everything else is just a minor tweak on an existing product.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    I don't know about that. You have some connectors and adapters, but most people's investments are online instead of in long lived hardware. Maybe some Mac apps? But most users are primarily on Safari and iTunes. Hardly locked in?
- shafyy 8y ago
  Yes, their smartphones and Macbooks are not innovating at the pace that they used to. But so aren't Google's, Microsoft's, Samsung's and all other PC/Smartphone company's. The reason for that is that PCs and smartphones are plateauing as a computing platform. I'm super curious to see what Apple's game for VR and AR headsets will be. Currently, Oculus/FB is leading the race there.
  - p2t2p 8y ago
    Well, at least I can plug an external GPU into latest MacBook Pro. Can’t do it with latest Surface - not T3 ports.
- nopzor 8y ago
  There is lock in to the wider ecosystem beyond a particular phone feature, eg. iMessage, iTunes, HomePod, etc. Plus, apple has a huge lead in CPU and GPU performance and this is only accelerating, paving the way for future potential phone features imo.
- matwood 8y ago
  > Their products aren't compelling anymore -- they're living off the momentum of prior greatness. Not compelling relative to what? People have been saying this about Apple with respect to the original iPhone X (which sold a very large amount), the Apple Watch, and even the iPad which they managed to bring sales back up as the rest of the tablet industry floundered. > As soon as someone else has a compelling, exclusive phone feature, Apple's likely to collapse. Your biases show through when you talk about a company with the resources of Apple collapsing because of one exclusive phone feature. In reality, Apple's biggest challenge is competing against last years iPhone. > There's no lock in, and there's no reason to be loyal -- it's a fashion brand. Again, your biases. For many people iOS is the easiest mobile OS to use. It has it's quirks, but for many people it just works.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    > Not compelling relative to what? To desktops and laptops that offer more RAM/CPU/GPU per buck while costing much less. > For many people iOS is the easiest mobile OS to use. If they can afford it. Not so easy when earning 500 euros or less per month.
    - p2t2p 8y ago
      I lived in Latvia for one year. Median salary - 370. Lots of people with iPhones. Not her latests iPhones but lots of people. Funny thing - there was a great divide - the biggest amount of dumbphones I’ve ever seen since iPhone introduction and yet, lot and lots of iPhones.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        It would be interesting to correlate if they were new or 2nd hand, alongside the owner's income.
    - xvector 8y ago
      > To desktops and laptops that offer more RAM/CPU/GPU per buck while costing much less. This is not why people buy Macs, and it hasn't been in a long time. If anything, Macs are closer to giving performance/$ than they usually ever have. People by Macs for aesthetic and usability. The vast majority of the population does not care "how many gigahertz their RAM has", and Mac sales reflect this.
thrower123 8y ago
> the new focus on privacy is going to win them even more loyalty. This seems to be a common talking point, but I'm not convinced it is a real driver outside of a small niche of within the niche of software people. Privacy is not something regular people really are aware of or give a damn about. The biggest driver towards getting an iPhone that I see is shutting up friends who whine because you're a "green person" in their iMessage.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  The privacy aspect is what has, and will continue to be why the iphone is the preferred phone for businesses and governments that give their employees a smartphone. This was a big factor as to why blackberry's phone business didn't die sooner than it did.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Apple have an edge over its competitors because they can afford to go full-on tinfoil with privacy; it wouldn’t put a dent in their business model. And while laypeople today care little about privacy, Apple can bring it into the collective consciousness. All it takes is a good meme (in the original Dawkins sense, not in the image-macro sense). A meme that tells people: “only the poor can’t afford privacy”. If they can get this into people’s heads then they’ll demand privacy, because nobody likes feeling poor.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    That causality assertion is hard to prove... Maybe true for you, may or may not be true generally.
- fmajid 8y ago
  I would have agreed with you about apathy in the general population, but The Information had an interesting data point a week ago: "According to a Pew Research Center study, 26% of Facebook users in the U.S. have deleted the app entirely and 74% have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months. User growth on Facebook is slowing." So there is hope after all.
- 8y ago
ArchTypical 8y ago
> Apple is the most valuable company in history That's a belief. > the new focus on privacy I see a trend here.
starshadowx2 8y ago
Apple isn't "the most valuable company in history" it just has the highest market cap of a public company in the USA right now.
- ianwalter 8y ago
  What is the most valuable company in history? What company in the world has a higher market value than Apple?
  - afthonos 8y ago
    Saudi Aramco is somewhere in the 1.2-2T area: https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-aramco-may-have-to-settle-for-just-a-trillion-or-so https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-13/saudi-a...
    - ianwalter 8y ago
      Thats not a publicly traded company though right? My point being “it just has the highest market cap of a public company in the USA right now” is misleading.
  - Naga 8y ago
    The hard part is that nominally Apple is the most valuable, because it has the highest market value, but of course that doesn't take into consideration inflation. I think the general consensus is that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the most valuable. Excuse the below clickbait article, but it was the first result when I searched: https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/how-rich-was-the-dutch-east-india-company/ https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/how-rich-was-the-dut...
    - ianwalter 8y ago
      But like the parent comment said, thats market cap, not value. Value isn’t market cap because the market is irrational and VOC is a perfect example of that.
pjmlp 8y ago
Outside of US and other first world countries they are not. Not everyone across the globe has salaries to pay for privacy features.

lallysingh 8y ago

Google + Facebook both grew out of singular products that kept making lots of money without requiring further deep investment -- just scaling, maintenence, and filling in feature gaps. They grew to keep investors happy about them having only one cash cow. They don't know how to do that. I'd prefer Google stay its old self and they make Alphabet the primary growth vehicle. But people need to show impact to get promoted, so you can't very well leave a good product alone. So now they have the mess of an organization they have now. The management angle from the article is interesting. Google originally didn't want management and there has always been a "necessary evil" attitude towards it there. So management was given an unexpected free pass on being evil. They weren't required to Googley and got hired from other places that were distinctly not so (e.g., IBM).

dswalter 8y ago

Google is heavily investing in cloud; in 2015 they embarked on a sizable shift, where they decided it was worth using their considerable head starts in databases and machine learning. They open-sourced Kubernetes and Tensorflow that year, both with a view toward cannibalizing AWS's lead. They released Apache Beam the following year, but it hasn't caught on the same way. At this point, Kubernetes is winning everywhere, so why not use Google's infrastructure for it? , and tensorflow has enough adoption that you might go to Google Cloud just because they integrate so tightly with it. More recently, Google purchased Kaggle, and has turned Jupyter notebooks into Colab, as well as hiring Jake VanDerPlas out of UW. They're trying to turn GCP as the easy, first choice solution for running and versioning your darn notebooks. But if you're already there, why not use BigTable to pull the data INTO the notebooks...? There are definitely tone-deaf steps they're taking, but Google is building serious advantages into their cloud offerings.

rhodysurf 8y ago
Not to mention Firebase and everything that goes with it

icebraining 8y ago

I frankly don't see the difference; all of them seem pretty similar to me, with large bets on unproven tech (hololens, waymo), trying to cash in on enterprise and developers (Office 365+Azure, GSuite+GCloud). And saying that MS is executing well when just three days ago they had to pull a Windows update due a data loss bug that passed their QA seems funny.

nwah1 8y ago
Microsoft is putting out compelling products and has the #2 cloud platform and fastest growing cloud platform. They have lots of developer momentum with VS Code, Typescript, .NET Core, etc. Their recent acquisitions make sense, mostly, unlike some of their rivals. I don't like either Amazon or Microsoft, but from a business angle they are both impressive. They are both at risk of going off the rails at any point, but I have much more respect for Bezos and Nadella than anyone at Facebook, Google, or Apple.

askafriend 8y ago

While you've been asleep in bed at home, Apple have built an insane services business and scaled the iPhone to heights no one could have predicted. Not only that but they quietly made the Apple Watch and AirPods a force of culture, made huge strides with their iPad lineup and have nailed the execution on all three which only feeds value back into the overall Apple ecosystem. It's no longer about any single product anymore, though the iPhone still is the 800 pound Gorilla of the product lineup and the obvious lynchpin tying everything together. But there is also Apple Music, iCloud, The App Store, Apple Pay and huge investments into AR, ML, Privacy, and a whole host of developer APIs. You're missing the forest for the trees of why Apple is able to make such _deep_ inroads into peoples lives and get them to pay top dollar for it at scale (50mm iPhones are made and shipped every quarter). And don't forget all the strides they've made in retail with their Apple Stores. Don't forget the insane chips their chip design team has been pumping out every year. Don't forget their acquisition of Beats and going head to head with Spotify. It's easy to take all this progress for granted. As a beloved consumer business, they're firing on all cylinders as far as I'm concerned. They'll make mistakes from time to fine and that's ok (iOS 11, AirPower, Mac Pro) - but you've got to ignore quite a lot of progress to make such a strong claim that they're asleep at the wheel - they are decidedly not asleep at the wheel by any measure.