The difference between these two companies is that one publicizes the stuff it's working on and rushes it to market, while the other keeps it all secret until it's ready.
Also, Apple is working on AR glasses(rumored to be announced next year), self-driving car and are making a big push into digital health.
Apple is far from doomed, they still have a lot of room for growth.
Waymo is the defacto number one leader in self-driving, whereas Apple’s self driving unit is having huge issues internally. Similarly, didn’t Verily just receive a $1 billion dollar investment a few days ago with Silver Lake as the primary backer for it’s various life science hardware/digital technologies it’s working on like LiftWare [1], Project Baseline [2], etc?
[1] Liftware - https://youtu.be/cFHwoOkSj7w
[2] Baseline Study - https://projectbaseline.com
Apple has more diversified revenue than Alphabet. Why would you say Alphabet is more successful?. All this tells me is that Apple thinks long and hard before publicizing what it's working on, they won't show us prototypes.
> Waymo is the defacto number one leader in self-driving, whereas Apple’s self driving unit is having huge issues internally with getting anything done.
ALL of Apple's reported problems had to do with the MAKING of a car, not autonomous systems. People just don't get this distinction. We will know how far their system is at the end of this month when the DMV releases their disengagement report. By the way, recent developments indicate that Apple is back to building an electric self-driving car instead of a self-driving platform.
This is the correct approach, yet a lot of people still haven’t internalized this subtle distinction.
For a self-driving platform to deliver on the promise of being more reliable than a human driver, it has to constantly monitor two environments: its internal environment and its external environment, but most discussions dwell on the external.
External environment failure in the worst case scenario can lead to loss of life. OTOH, internal environment failure can lead to internal inconsistency and in the worst case, a machine shutdown; but because cars share the road with other road users, a sudden failure in one car can lead to multiple car accidents and in a worst case scenario, several lives lost. In a way, the failure outcomes are identical.
An electric car is far less complex than an ICE car meaning there are fewer moving parts and subsystems whose state needs to be kept track of constantly. This is where electric drivetrains hold a lot of promise: a low complexity machine can be made more reliable at a lower cost than a high complexity machine.
What about,
Loon - https://loon.co/
Dandelion - https://dandelionenergy.com/
Wing - https://x.company/wing/
Chronicle - https://chronicle.security/
Malta - https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061
Apple is almost 100% definitively not working on a molten salt energy storage solution I can promise you. And the reason is because it’s just not in it’s corporate structure or culture. Far too constrained / trapped in it’s niche to expand outwards into such a vastly different market.
Some links: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/a-peek-inside-alphabets-in... http://www.gv.com/portfolio/ https://capitalg.com/companies/
A “successful” product for a profit making company is one that makes money.....
Google hasn’t shown an ability to ptofitably sell anything but ads.
According to numbers that came out during the Oracle lawsuit, even Android has only made Google $31 Billion since its inception.
The $31B revenue would be huge for almost any company. The magnitude of Google's largest cash cow, a glowing golden cow towering over the farm house, makes their normal-sized livestock look small. Because everything is so insignificant compared to advertisements, Google has killed projects that could be the entire product of a sustainable smaller company.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-...
And that’s $31 billion in revenue not profit.
The profit over 8 years is only $21 billion.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
Based on what?
Also, that 86% is basically from Google Search ads and YouTube. YouTube's quarterly revenue is estimated to be just under $4 billion. That puts Google Search ads at around 72%, which is still higher than the iPhone's 59%.
The notion that Alphabet's "other" projects succeeded while Apple's languished is completely baseless.
Google's last quarterly report says 24bn in revenue from Google properties, and ~5bn from non-google properties. If we add in that YT is a separate property too, we get ~60% from Google, ~12% from youtube, ~15% from network, ~14% from hardware/android/cloud.
(I work at Google, but I am using public figures from the Q3 investor relations document and your analyst number for YT revenue).
Does nobody proof read these things before they get published?
Perhaps this portion is what confuses you: stores electricity as heat in "the form of a combination of a" high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid. This would be an explicit wording which might help to clarify things, but is not used due to redundancy.
I do agree though that Apple is more diversified than a company that keeps selling super-expensive beta tests that get killed after the first or second try doesn't work.
Oh wait, no I didn't. Because of those 3, Apple is the least diversified company, and it's major revenue source is driven by a single line of products (the iPhone) which drives nearly every one of its other major revenue sources (i.e., the App Store). The double-whammy effect is part of why investors are so concerned: users not buying new iPhones means that users are also buying fewer apps in the App Store.
Probably Maps and Android are the two products they do that I would consider 'quality'.
I'm not happy with Tensorflow, Golang, or Kubernetes.
In a very real sense, Alphabet has an r selected corporate strategy, while Apple is K selected[0]
I pay for Google Music and YouTube for $16 for 5 family members and me. I haven't seen a YouTube ad for years. Best use of my money every month.
What's your issue with Golang though?
It feels like a lot of the things that happen like if err != nil are code smell. I wrote a cli in go and wouldn't mind it again but I program in elixir now and the emphasis on developer joy is refreshing (but it makes wise choices, e.g limiting the scope of macros to lexical)
As to your comment on innovation, Apple has largely squandered it's source of foundational income cornering itself into a niche, such that though it may be extremely innovative in it's area (Apple has some amazing processor design for example), is fundamentally constrained by the limited pieces it has to work with.
Basically, instead of undergoing a necessary evolution like we've seen from the progression of Google -> Alphabet, Apple has failed to scale itself in a way where it can keep up. This by no means is meant as a sleight to any Apple employees though, as I know from first hand experience that some of the best and brightest people are working there. It's just a matter of how scaling works. Horizontal scaling allows for unlimited growth, whereas vertical scaling quickly reaches an asymptotic ceiling.
Google for most of the last decade has had it 'easy' though. The natural expansion of its ad revenue has reduced the need for it to turn some 'evilness' dials to keep revenue and profit growing. With Apple its very straight forward, they sell things, and if you want their services you pay for them.
How much has that goodwill improved profitability? What were people going to do, revolt and use Bing?
Alphabet's approach to innovation is to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. I’m not disparaging that approach, it’s probably what I would do if I had all the money in the world. But I’m not convinced that any of these “moonshots” are amounting to much yet.
Apple has been described by many as the world’s largest startup. They’re very careful with their focus and resources, even to the point of killing off successful products (not just iPods, but things like their routers and printers). They _could_ just spend money and grow, but they know that would lead Apple to not being Apple anymore.
So what is Apple? A strangely conservative company with a clear vision of the future that they approach slowly and methodically.
Apple brought us the “touch future” and the truly “personal computer” (the one you take everywhere in your pocket). We still haven’t fully realized this potential and Apple is still building on it. Look me up in ten years and let me know if they’ve hit that vertical ceiling.
I wonder what the future will hold? Culture seems like the strongest indicator for whether changes can be made. Without the sort of long term vision Jobs had to guide the company from the top down, successful pivoting depends on if internal company culture can support a bottom up revitalization I think.