I stand corrected. Thanks for that.
NeXt is definitely a great exception here, thanks for reminding me of that.
I'm not saying Apple shouldn't be buying companies, in fact I'm all for it but I would want to see Apple integrate and iterate its own services faster than it does now. Apple never had any good track records with it web services, even right now I can't think of a single web service that is great.
Imagine Apple buying NeXt but didn't improve OS X afterward, it would've still gone out of business on its own.
The thing is, there's no knowing the future. When I first heard about the NeXT Cube, I
knew it was the right approach to personal computing. When Apple later acquired NeXT (and re-acquired Steve), I
knew that was the right move, too. But I could have been wrong. We just don't know until the future has become history.
I don't think NeXT was the exception to the acquisition "rule." However, we often don't know just what has been acquired, no less whether it found its way into future Apple products. I'm pretty confident that Apple's management and board of directors do know, and are fully aware of the cost of the alternative. For the most part, Apple has "gambled" on buying companies and talent before those companies can be traded on the stock market. As a result, they pay a substantially lower price and get the tech (when it's successful) far sooner than had they waited for it to become proven by the marketplace. But the farther a product is from fruition, the more likely it won't succeed. That's unavoidable.
There's no doubt that, as in any large organization, there will be times when institutional forces resist the winds of change. Entrepreneurial leaders may chafe under the weight of a bureaucracy. Creatives may want a faster timeline... Some will leave in disgust and announce their availability on LinkedIn, while others quietly stay on the job and honor their NDAs. We just don't know enough to judge whether Apple's acquisition process is genius, or a fool's errand.
Meantime... What Apple, Google, Amazon, Viv (among others) are trying to do with AI is really, really difficult. They are driving each other towards success. If/when they succeed, it won't be one company that owns that future, or solves all the challenges. Even if patent monopolies temporarily keep the benefits out of the public domain, eventually all the world will own the benefits.
Despite advances in UI design, we humans still have to adapt to our machines. We're finally moving towards machines that will adapt to us. Speech control may be the penultimate UI (the ultimate would be telepathy, IMO) - yet speech will always have shortcomings. We don't only interact with and control our world verbally/linguistically - any musician, stone mason, or kayaker can tell you that.
I've been waiting patiently for certain aspects of the future for about 50 years. And the stories that predicted that future were already "old" and "classic" by the time I was inspired by them. We've long known that AI is hard, really hard, and that it's been advancing in small steps, not giant leaps. All the "intelligent assistants" out there are still in relative infancy. Many of us demand that, to be satisfactory, computer-assistants must be essentially omniscient. Yet if our closest friends and family members routinely misunderstand us, what hope is there for Siri, Cortana, HAL, et. al.? We have enough trouble with sentient assistants. "Genie, make me a chocolate malted." "Poof, you're a chocolate malted!"
Yet perfection is what humanity demands. We can accept imperfection in ourselves (or, at least occasionally tolerate it), but we have zero tolerance when it comes to machines. Autonomous vehicles could, hopefully, reduce the US highway death toll by 99.9%, but some of us would treat those remaining fatalities as unpardonable sins. Better to lose 39,960 lives to human error than to trust a machine.
We're still haunted by the possibility of a Frankenstein's Monster. We don't trust humanity to build benevolent machines.We expect well-intended experiments to backfire, and we expect that mad scientists will try to take over the world. We seem to have very little faith in good intentions and competent science and engineering. We're so afraid of science run amok that we'd rather put our future into the hands of former prom queens, generals, house painters, actors, spy agency officials, real estate speculators, religious fanatics, reality TV personalities...
