aaploutsider

StrangeDays said:

rogifan_new said:

Apple is a high volume innovator in and beyond phones. Google and Microsoft are not.

Huh?? This statement makes no sense. And comparing these three companies is stupid anyway. Apple primarily sells consumer hardware and services that can be used with that hardware. Google and Microsoft’s primary business models are not that at all. 

I think the point is Apple successfully operates as many different other companies have and do:

- a PC company (an IBM, Dell, etc)
- a music player company (Creative, Nomad)
- a video camera company (Go Pro)
- a point and shoot camera company (take your pic)
- a cellphone maker
- a watch maker 
- a cloud storage company (Dropbox)
- a set-top box (Roku)
- a video streaming company?

...etc. Apple operates in spaces were usually a company specialized in, and Apple is doing all of them,  often dominating with leading or historic successes. This is certainly noteworthy, and a distinction. Their fiscal health is incredible. Which makes the DOOM narratives and reporting slants all the more idiotic. 

Google sells ads successfully. 

MS has a few more different businesses...Windows, Office, XBox. 

This is the epitome of ignorance here. You can argue that they do all those things, but they perform at the level of basic functionality for many of those things. 1. As a PC company, they have had mild success. They are still not targeting enterprises as much as IBM/Dell, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here. 2. As a music player company, everyone's already moved past this. Where's HomePod in this? 3. As a video camera company, people don't really compare using iPhones with action cameras. What about RED cameras? 4. As a point and shoot camera company, Google's Pixel actually delivers comparable quality especially at night. Regardless, practically all phones are capable of this. 5. As a cell phone maker, their bread and butter is in the U.S. They still lose out globally (for now?) 6. As a watch maker, their phones have a limited lifespan. They are disrupting the low end watch industries. The mid/upper ends are unaffected. 7. As a cloud storage company, they have iCloud which is mediocre compared to Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and a myriad of other agnostic platform companies. No one really considers iCloud a formidable competitor as they are scaled to consumers. 8. As a set top box, Apple TV has largely been a non competitor to the Rokus, Fire TVs, etc. Their market share is at the bottom. 9. As a video streaming company, that's to be determined. Of the 9 bullets you've mentioned, I'd say success really is in 4 of the 9. The other 5 they have been outperformed by their competitors in multitudes of angles. Luckily those competitors also allow you to use their products platforms agnostically.

On one hand, having a lot of content allows you to gauge your users' interests and demographics. On the other hand, you need that data to focus on "quality" for your audience. My question is how does Apple determine what's "quality" if they don't really provide much content to gauge its users? It's not binary.

Keep in mind that this article is only sampling a small minority of the target audience, so AI's conclusion is nothing more than anecdotal and selective rationale.  

We will have to see how the targeted industry in general responds to this.  I know major studios have beefy non-Mac workstations partly because they have been burned by Apple before.  It will be interesting to see if they will look to replace their current workstations for their Avid/Premiere collaborative workflows.  

Doom doesn't happen overnight. Apple is not doomed per se, but they may show stagnant growth.

What some of these opinions tell you, aside from any conspiracies about driving stock down, is that it's more to caution investors. We keep hearing the words "record breaking" or "all time high", but those words in marketing speak are carefully spun for a specific purpose.

I've worked at companies where on a PR front they performed great, but if you saw the data, you'd realize they were not as great as what their PR is saying.

Soli said:

smaffei said:

Who else thinks this a poor business decision on Apple's part?

I would rather see them align with Microsoft (Azure) than Amazon (AWS). I see Microsoft as less of a competitor than Amazon (in many spaces).

And, what are all those Apple owned server farms doing besides using solar panels? With all of that propaganda Apple pushes out, I would have never thought they are paying Amazon $30 million a month,

I don't see it as a bad decision in terms of competition, but I do wonder why Apple needs this at all with all their efforts made to build out massive data centers. I can see have backups for systems that aren't on your hardware design, but this feels more like Apple's own data centers aren't performing well. Can that really be the cause? I don't think that's likely so I think I'm missing some key details.

A linked article in the above stated that they are guessing Apple will take 2+ years to abandon 3rd party cloud vendors in favor of their own.