(1) Google has partnered with Diane Von Furstenberg on Glass and...there isn't a whole lot to show for it. Glass has ~zero mindshare among fashion-forward peopl

(1) Google has partnered with Diane Von Furstenberg on Glass and...there isn't a whole lot to show for it. Glass has ~zero mindshare among fashion-forward people. I cannot stress the importance of design as a core competency. (2) You're the second person to respond with "data is everything" in machine learning, but it's more complicated than that. While Google has Hinton working on deep nets and Kevin Murphy on knowledge representations, this cutting-edge work represents something closer to MS Research or Bell Labs. These models take years to affect production. My experience is that "a couple of percentage points" above 90% actually matters little--the marginal cost of obtaining those points is enormous (many many hidden layers in your convolutional net really slows it down) with little real-world benefit (a user can't tell the difference between 90 and 95%--they'll just think of the product as "really really good"). I believe Apple can approach the point where their NLP/speech tech is "good enough" relative to Google.