The BlackBerry’s success came to an end not because RIM started releasing worse smartphones, but because the new job of the smartphone shifted almost entirely outside of their capabilities, and it was too late to catch u
Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for.
If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for Apple.
Marco makes a lot of good points and I agree with this 100%. The mobile phone market as we know it is primed for the "next big thing" by someone. Who that is, and whether they are right remains to be seen. Do I mean that the current market is stagnant, or that innovation is dead? Of course not. But, I do think changes we'll see from the big 2 to their platforms will be incremental. There will always be new UI paradigms, features, and apps that can augment a platform.
The next large improvement will be what our devices start DOING with the data we give them. Not just inputs and outputs. But contextually understanding the data and begin to make predictions on it. Apple is "good" at the former; give them something and they will give it back to you quickly. iMessage and the new photos are examples of this. Passwords, backups, and sync are examples of where they fall short. However, they can't act on that data. Photos knows who someone is because you tagged them. Or knows how much you liked a photo or a restaurant because you gave it stars. Input and outputs. Compare this to Google photos (which is downright amazing) that automatically just "knows" who is in the photo or figures out that an event took place because you traveled to it.
Google is king of data mining and context (Facebook and Amazon are not far behind). As Marco explains in his piece, Apple just can't catch up to that. It's my hope that the awesome that Google will bring in the form of Ai to devices won't be restricted to Android. I'm sure that Android will always have the most seamless experience, but it will be nice if Google's apps bring much of it to iPhone. Even better, would be for Google and Apple to get along again ala when Google Maps came installed on your iPhone