Rightly or wrongly, Apple’s stock taking a prolonged plunge has opened the floodgates for people to hold court about what it is that Apple’s apparently doing wrong — and how the company can be righted again.
Today it was the turn of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures. His answer: that Apple is failing to invest enough in artificial intelligence and cloud cloud computing.
Speaking on CNBC‘s “Squawk Box,” Wilson said that, “The future of technology is more and more in the cloud. It’s more and more in machine learning and AI. It’s not really in the devices. [Apple] is very much a hardware company and a systems software company.”
Wilson has previously offered the opinion (back in 2014) that Apple won’t be one of the top three tech companies by 2020, which means that at least he’s consistent with his opinions.
As to whether there’s anything in his views, that’s another story. While few people would deny that cloud computing and AI are massive areas of interest (even if the latter is heavily prone to boom-and-bust hype cycles), Apple’s not exactly unsuccessful with its focus on hardware instead of software.
In fact, last year Apple managed to carve out a whopping 40 percent of Silicon Valley profits using its apparently-outdated business model. Moreover, critics have been suggesting that Apple gets out of the hardware business since the 1990s — only for Steve Jobs’ return to Apple to teach many of those critics just how wrong they were.
There has been some recent evidence that Apple is upping its focus on AI and the cloud, however. Recently it was reported that Apple is ramping up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts in an attempt to compete with companies like Google — with Cupertino’s number of machine learning gurus tripling or even quadrupling over the past few years. While there are plenty of areas where AI can be applied within Apple’s existing services, it would seem to fit most obviously within the company’s rumored Apple Car project, which is likely to have self-driving elements.
In terms of cloud computing, Apple is rumored to be working on an internal project dubbed “Project McQueen,” designed to decrease its current reliance on cloud services belonging to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Do you think Fred Wilson is right in his view that AI and cloud computing are things Apple should embrace more than it currently is? Leave your comments below.
Source: CNBC
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Top venture capitalist says Apple should be focused on AI”
Saying that Apple should be investing in AI and Cloud services is akin to saying we need to get water to people living in the desert. Not only is it “duh”, but there’s no insight as to what or how. So now, when Apple improves Siri with new features, this guy can say “Well, I’m glad Apple listened to me!” – and other people can praise him for how insightful he is.
The best thing Apple can do is move to providing adaptable workspaces across devices. Microsoft is doing the “one experience” across devices (with Continuum) which is really neat, but to take it to the next level and adopt the UI to the task and user preference. Apple has already started bringing in features where my open work is available when moving to a different device (so if I start a presentation on my desktop, I can pick up where I left off on my iPad), but it’s limited. You could even answer some of the iPad Critics by coming up with a way to use cloud based virtual machines to do any task on any device. I would even be okay with OS X on a tablet if there was a “Simple Mode” that simplifies the entire UI & UX. I don’t want to see OS X at all – Continuum, but more (Windows 10 is not “simple enough” on the tablet to make me want to use it.
As for AI… These assistants (Cortana, Siri, Alexa) are okay, but what they really need to do is to help me take away mundane computer tasks I don’t want to do. I don’t want to bother with the file system – let an AI find the file I need. Give me a panel on the right side of my screen that has possibly associated documents – even in other applications. If I’m working on a client proposal, a view of the design sketches might be helpful – then that goes away when I close the doc. Allow me, no matter what OS on the desktop, to transfer files to my tablet. Adobe has been working on this with their creative cloud suite.
In the end, I want AI and Cloud (along with OS, UI, UX) to get the computer to allow me to concentrate on the task at hand instead of having to know how to make the computer do what I want it to do.
When you write that “Apple’s not exactly unsuccessful with its focus on hardware instead of software.”, you’re showing a lack of understanding of the enormous energy and effort that Apple has put into it’s App development tools. Apple’s Swift language has taken the entire development community by storm, and is even being considered by Google as a first class language for Android development. But that’s not all; Xcode and the enormous depth and power of Apple’s SDKs are nothing short of stunning.