Don't Panic, But We've Passed Peak Apple (and Google, and Facebook) 307
waderoush writes "Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing. (Add in Amazon, if you're feeling generous.) But it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new — and there are good reasons to think they never will again. This Xconomy essay argues that the innovation engines at Google, Apple, and Facebook are out of gas (the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat) and that other players will have to come up with the underpinnings for the next big cycle of advances in computing. Granted, it's not as if any of these companies will disappear. But the idea that they'll go on generating ideas as groundbreaking as the ones that landed them in the spotlight defies common sense, statistics, and the lessons of history, which show that real innovation almost always comes from small companies. Apple, Google, and Facebook aren't too big to fail — but they may be too big to keep succeeding."
Sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
But I won't believe it till Netcraft confirms it.
Hmm, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Business Map (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why Facebook is owned by Google, which in turn is owned by Microsoft, which in turn is owned by IBM, which.... oh wait.. nevermind. You can only buy if someone is willing to sell to you, no matter the size of your purse - if that is the entirety of your business road map you're bound to be left behind in the dust when someone comes along, innovative and unwilling to sell. Like Google+, Bing or OS2.
Re:Error in summary ? (Score:5, Insightful)
They can absolutely fail, that they have not yet proves nothing. Nokia is barely hanging on, yet 10 years ago we would easily have believed that label on them.
Google need to slow down (Score:1, Insightful)
They are getting so much persona data from us all that they need to build 'n' more data centers around the world to process it all let alone all the data they are going to get from Glass.
Thankfully, if you Google for me, you come up with nothing. How long can I get away with this? My guess that not very long, eventually everyone will be have there relationship with everyone else mapped out all nice and cleanly and pretty for their NSA Overlords.
Google, the worldwide arm of the NSA. The world is sleep walking onto a surveileance state where the uSA is watching everyone in the world legally or not, they don't care really.
Is Loon not innovative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe whoever wrote this article isn't impressed by interesting things that these companies create. Do they believe that because they are big and their innovations should also be "big"? This article is stupid.
Innovation only from Google, FB, Apple ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without pioneering folks like Jack Kilby, you think we have electronic computers ?
Without hardware providers such as Intel which transformed CPU into affordable commodity items, you think we get $399 iPhone/iPad ?
And by the way, what kind of "innovation" FB has brought to the world ?
Re:Innovation only from Google, FB, Apple ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is more innovation in home Garages and basements than Apple,Google,FB,Microsoft, and HP combined. They just lack funding.
Have they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook was the result of some epic timing, but I can't necessarily call them innovative. Before Facebook, there were some pretty well populated social networks, Myspace being the one whose problems they solved, but Geocities, AIM, and IRC before it also helped break ground. Facebook brought very few foundational ideas to the table.
Apple is a victim of its own success. No matter what they release, it will be compared to the iPhone (which brought smartphones and data plans to the masses), or the iPad (which all but started the tablet PC market). Very few companies have ever had products that successful, and the fact of the matter is that it's nearly impossible to maintain that momentum consistently.
Google might have a handful of good ideas left in it, but they have a different problem. When they started, it was basically a haven for geeks where they could throw Jell-O at the wall and see what stuck. I'm certain that there were projects that spent a week being added to the drawing board and were never pursued, to say nothing of the projects that have ultimately been scrapped over time. The problem is that Google has financial expectations on it now, which means that the geeks who could come up with some innovative ideas need to allocate their time pursuant to whether they can meet their deadlines. This kind of thinking leaves a lot of the gambling on the table.
Amazon doesn't need much innovation. They're the Wal-Mart of the internet, and this isn't a bad thing. They all but 'personify' the term "economies of scale". .If it's a good idea, Amazon can throw resources at it, whether it be servers, distribution, money, or audience. They have all of these things in great abundance, and generally keep their customers happy with cheap prices and (unlike wal-mart) generally very good customer service, and do so extremely efficiently. As long as they keep doing this, and do it as well as they have been for nearly 20 years, then they will continue to be profitable.
The problem with innovation in this context is that it doesn't seem to count, except when it does. The Newton was innovative. The PocketPC was, at some level, innovative. "Innovation" isn't what's being looked for. What is being looked for is "Innovation that immediately captures the public's attention and makes a substantial amount of money, market share, and mindshare in a very short period of time".
Re:Facebook, google invented little (Score:5, Insightful)
It's part of the Ayn Rand mentality where all credit is given to the appropriate tyrant whether or not that guy is actually an "entrepenuer" or not. No one considers the little guy whether that's current upstart startups or just the cogs in the tyrant's company.
Bizarro Computing World Maybe (Score:1, Insightful)
So yeah I'm only a top UNIX syadmin for a 100 billion dollar 150 year old company so I may be out of the loop. But Apple, Google, and Facebook are exactly no where to be found in our platforms. It's the usual suspects, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, even Redhat. Maybe little Johnny with his phone counts as the world of computing online. Yes, some people with Mac laptops bother us sometimes because they are just too cool to use company issued stuff and instead end up being the most annoying little buggers of all because nothing the company uses works on their cool machines and they actually think we are thrilled to help them every other week even though.. sorry rambling.
Re:Glass??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"The trash can would make a great high end consumer Mac."
That is, in fact, what it is, or at least would be if they'd offer even a single drive bay.
By any traditional definition of "workstation" it is not one. It is no more a workstation than the Mini is. Both need additional products to make them functional as such.
Re:Glass... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Glass is too nerd for common people.
I remember when the name "iPad" would provoke giggles.
Re:This study is full of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
like apple bought mac os, and microsoft stole it.
the real innovators seldom get credit.
I wonder why no one wants to go into engineering or computers in college. Anyone who can, rather do business and own the ideas the engineers and computer people make, and then laugh when they kick them to the curb when they have nothing left to give.
GPL your code, and throw it on github, if your not business savy enough. Its that much more for the public tha parasites can't use leverage.
Re:Glass??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You understand that there is a huge gulf between "hundreds of man-hours to cram square stuff into fun shapes" and bringing to market a mass-produced product? I have no idea what the price of the Mac Pro will be, but I'm fairly sure it will be more commercially viable than a hand-build one-off.
Re:Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple has always been more about taking the technology available and packaging it into something easy to use and accessible.
Hear, hear!
Apple's real strength is industrial design [wikipedia.org]. Their engineering is competent, but nothing terribly inventive (certainly not relative to the stature of the company). People whose only understanding of technology is going "ooh, ahh" over the latest consumer product don't seem to understand the difference. In terms of engineering and innovation the real McCoy has been the work done by others to create the latest gen fab process, OLED displays, or wireless standards and chip level implementation. Apple puts them together into nice packages. There is nothing wrong with that as a business, but the real technological innovation comes from their suppliers and other companies.
Facebook is even less of a tech company. Obviously they use computers and networks, but so do banks. Does anybody call banks tech companies because of that? Facebook is about marketing an idea, not any great technological innovation.
Re:Error in summary ? (Score:5, Insightful)
And to extend your point...
Before Nokia, it was Motorola that made the best phones on the market.
But, they stagnated and Nokia took it over with their innovation.
After building their market, Nokia stagnated and others started taking over from them (Samsung comes to mind).
One can't always be the market leader because of the load of work on the company.
Being the biggest/best producer of something requires a company to supply a lot of product to meet that demand. So, a lot of resource is spent just on maintaining supply required by being in 1st place.
That doesn't leave as much resource or insight into "what to develop next." The leader in a market doesn't have someone else to look at to see what they need to develop... they can only look to themselves.
Competitors behind/outside of the market leader have the opportunity to see what directions that leader is trying out and to follow in step... focusing on how to take those concepts that seem to work and build upon them.
Innovate or replicate... two main strategies of product growth and success for a business.
If you're the leader, you have to innovate to keep your lead. Replicating a competitors innovation means "you're falling behind" and appear to be "failing" (whether that is true or not... it tends to be the perspective of the market).
As a competitor, you can innovate and/or replicate (and improve) to capture some of that market away from the leader.
Constant correct innovation is impossible to maintain forever for a single business.
Re:Glass??? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you fail to realize is that there are now hundreds of thousands of pros who daily use a laptop in place of the workstation they had just 3 years ago.
It may look like a consumer grade Mac to you but what Apple is doing is to redefine the workstation. Consumers no longer buy desktops. They buy laptops or tablets. The desktop market has been shrinking for the last few years. Apple doesn't even make a desktop any more. The iMac and Mini are the closest you get.
So this is Apples Workstation/Desktop. It is what you make of it like anything else. I'm betting that the industry will start to follow Apples lead here though and you'll see similar offerings from HP, Sony, Samsung etc in the near future just as you see iMac type systems and AirBook "Ultrabook".
Re:Have they? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook has innovated.
They've innovated in data centers - you can't operate at the scale they do (bigger than Google or Apple in terms of networking and hardware) without innovation.
They've innovated in Big Data - hundreds of millions of users, billions of relationships between the accounts. Their Social Graph implementation is a big deal. Mining said data to enable search, photo tagging/suggest (just the scale of facial recognition going on is mind boggling) and of course for advertising / segmentation purposes.
They've innovated in their app program for developers - Zynga's FarmVille for better or worse was a sensation and would not have happened without FBs developer API.
They've innovated in Single Sign On / Federated ID - FB is the biggest provider of SSO in the western world (Weibo and TaoBao may have them beat in China). Salesforce is next followed by Twitter and LinkedIn.
I'm no FB fan as a consumer but to say they haven't innovated is the height of ignorance as a technologist.
Re:Hmm, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
"To be fair, once Google gets their cars that drive themselves, glasses that give me information at all times, and provide TV/phone services through a high speed fiber connection for cheaper than anyone else, I'm ok if they take a break for a bit and coast, just improving what they've already done."
This brings up a bone I have to pick with OP's basic premise. I think he's got things a bit distorted here.
Look at the announcement of the new Mac Pros at WWDC. You may not agree with everything they did with it, but to say it's "not innovation" is just a little bit skewed.
Google's big successes so far have been (A) a search engine, and (B) cheap fiber to the home. And B isn't even original, they just did it for less.
Driverless vehicles are nothing new, and the technology isn't even theirs. They just threw money behind it. Glass is pretty much the same: not an original idea, or even a very good one... other companies are doing "augmented" and "virtual" reality better, and without a Google lock-in. They did good on Maps but they abused it too. Hell, Facebook wasn't even Zuckerberg's idea. And the only "innovation" Facebook really represents is how to make money via privacy intrusion.
Not to burst anybody's bubble, but other than Google's search engine, pretty much ALL of the successful ideas from both companies have been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Pretty obvious ways to go, actually. In fact, pretty much all the other attempts at "revolutionary" things at Google have failed.
I'm not trying to compare companies here. I'm just saying OP doesn't have it right. He lumps things together that don't belong together, and makes generalizations about them that are just plain false. Google and Facebook have not, for the most part, been innovators. They had one or two good ideas and ran with them. We should not expect those companies to come up with the the next big ideas. That would be asking too much.
Re:Hmm, maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Driverless vehicles are nothing new, and the technology isn't even theirs. They just threw money behind it.
Companies don't have ideas, people have ideas. Companies just throw money at those people to develop the ideas that the company will then own. But to say all of those people working on that project at Google haven't innovated is absurd!
And innovation isn't just coming up with an idea in a sci-fi novel, it's making the idea WORK in the real world. Show me anyone who is as close as Google to making self-driving cars a reality and I'll agree it's not innovation. And more specifically, "a driverless car" is just one vague concept. There have probably been dozens or hundreds of innovations in the course of that project so far. Same with MANY other successful projects you call "evolutionary"...