Apple has always been “doomed”

I am a hardcore Apple fan. While I can’t make a as compelling case as I would like for why I think Apple isn’t doomed by myself, I wanted to share someone else’s case justifying my beliefs along with my thoughts on various topics.

Today, Rick Tetzeli at Fast Company published a fantastic, must-read story on Apple and its current state of leadership, business, product and vision under Tim Cook.

Here’s a paragraph that really highlights how people have always thought Apple was doomed every time any new technology popped up and how wrong they have been.

Over its 40 years of existence, Apple has been seen as a laggard in music, video, the Internet, telephony, wireless, content creation, networking, semiconductors, software applications, touch screens, gesture controls, materials, messaging, news aggregation, social media, voice recognition, and mapping. (That’s not even close to being an exhaustive list.) Nevertheless, the company has managed to survive by doing an unmatched job of integrating the most important of those technologies into products that eventually delight many customers

Apple’s devices have been the defining forces that really took most of the above mentioned technologies mainstream. It has never failed to delight its customers at some point in their relationships with the company.

Siri and Maps are two products that are most widely criticized. While people might consider them as “failures”, Apple knows what its doing and it knows how to turn so called failures into victories that are often times misunderstood by the public.

Apple now does public beta testing of its most significant software projects, something that Jobs never liked to do. In 2014, the company asked users to test run its Yosemite upgrade to OS X. Last year, it introduced beta testing of iOS, which is the company’s most important operating system. “The reason you as a customer are going to be able to test iOS,” Cue says, “is because of Maps.”

Apple has a Siri strategy in place.

First, the company works constantly to improve the underlying technology. As with Maps, Siri is the beneficiary of Apple’s treatment of it as a continually updated online service rather than something refreshed only with a major OS upgrade. Customers have caught up to the fact that Siri can successfully answer a wider variety of questions: It now handles 2 billion queries a week, double what it did a year ago.

Second, Apple regularly seeks out new places where Siri can help those customers. On an iPhone, Siri handles voice commands and questions by tapping into apps and pulling out answers. In cars equipped with Apple’s CarPlay dashboard-display system, it will recommend travel routes, find restaurants, and perform other functions. You can use Siri with an Apple Watch (presuming you haven’t socked yours away in a drawer). You can also use it to control your television via the Apple TV remote.

People keep saying that Apple is not investing enough in Siri, AI applications and most recently, chatbots. Cook captures this sentiment perfectly -

“What tends to happen with Apple, not just today but in the 18 years I’ve been here,” says Cook, “is that invariably some people compare what we’re doing now to a vision or a product that somebody says they will create in the future.”

Apple is very grounded in realities. It understands the current state of very new technology and adapts within the constraints to provide the best possible experience. Just because it does not boast about its work on things that will happen in the future doesn't mean it isn't working on, thinking about and building the future.

It is quite silly to think that Apple is falling behind on the arms race for AI. Yes, Google, Facebook and Amazon are advancing really fast. But, that does mean Apple is not going fast or has no vision. It’s just not as loud as the other giants.

If AI is becoming desirable to mainstream customers, Apple, the company that is supposedly so far behind, is better positioned than anyone to take advantage of an AI moment. None of its competitors offer both a wide range of products and a history of delivering great consumer experiences. Apple can put Siri to work in all kinds of existing services and products.

Cook says something that is so simply captures the essence of what Apple is really good at —

“People like things they can do now, not just think about,” Cook says. “I’ve been thinking about The Jetsons since I was a kid. But occasionally you want The Jetsons to come to reality. That’s what Apple is so great at: Productizing things and bringing them to you, so you can be a part of it.”

Apple has always been a product and a UX centric brand. It’s never been about shipping cool technologies. It’s always about shipping delightful products.

Press and public investors keep comparing Apple’s products to iPhone’s success. Cook is well aware of how one-of-kind success story iPhone is —

In terms of unit sales, yes, there may never be another iPhone. But in terms of revenue, well, look at the industries that Apple is just now entering, or is rumored to be pursuing. Media and entertainment is a $550 billion global market. Global car ownership is a $3.5 trillion business. Annual global health spending is more than $9 trillion. And while Apple may not currently dominate any of these arenas, remember that analysts once thought Apple would have a hit on its hands if it could garner 1% of the mobile phone business.

Back in April, with respect to Apple watch sales, I wrote in Apple Watch is the new Snapchat —

Apple watch’s success has so far been compared with iPhone’ instead of being compared to other products in the smartwatch space. This is both absurd & funny since both iPhone and the watch are owned by the same company.

The numbers for Apple watch surely look smaller when compared to iPhone’s numbers. Well, just like how Facebook is one of its kind in the social space, iPhone is one of its kind too. Well, not really. Thats an understatement. iPhone is the greatest business of all time. There’s no way anything at all is beating iPhone’s sales numbers over the years.

I really recommend reading that piece in Fast Company. It is one of the best profiles anyone has done in a while on Apple.