Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
marco.org
Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
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Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#2Apple has been taking a nuanced approach in blending public and on-device private analytics. The advantage of this privacy-oriented approach is that Apple gains better on-device metadata than Google, because it is based on explicit consent via structured APIs for data interchange. Over time, this can create implicit contextual search queries, with all the economic value that comes from deriving user intent.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#3The article makes a great point about Apple's susceptibility to being overthrown in the phone market. The watch hasn't really done well and iTunes DRM theft of people's music libraries is becoming a thing. It's ok if Apple dies like Blackberry. They've died before. This time, though, there's no Jobs to resurrect them. They might become the IBM of their generation of companies, still around, still hoarding cash, but not very relevant.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#4Apple has been taking a nuanced approach in blending public and on-device private analytics. The advantage of this privacy-oriented approach is that Apple gains better on-device metadata than Google, because it is based on explicit consent via structured APIs for data interchange. Over time, this can create implicit contextual search queries, with all the economic value that comes from deriving user intent.
In other words, since they got permission once in the past by means of some impossible to read ToS, they'll be better at reading our minds so they can monetize it? And we'll all feel better about it than Google's method of sucking up everything that's available and having their AI figure out how to monetize it?
Dave? What are you doing, Dave?
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#5Apple has been taking a nuanced approach in blending public and on-device private analytics. The advantage of this privacy-oriented approach is that Apple gains better on-device metadata than Google, because it is based on explicit consent via structured APIs for data interchange. Over time, this can create implicit contextual search queries, with all the economic value that comes from deriving user intent.
In other words, since they got permission once in the past by means of some impossible to read ToS, they'll be better at reading our minds so they can monetize it? And we'll all feel better about it than Google's method of sucking up everything that's available and having their AI figure out how to monetize it? Dave? What are you doing, Dave?
Fine-grained permissions that are actively maintained by users via Settings, not ToS.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, since they got permission once in the past by means of some impossible to read ToS, they'll be better at reading our minds so they can monetize it? And we'll all feel better about it than Google's method of sucking up everything that's available and having their AI figure out how to monetize it? Dave? What are you doing, Dave?
Fine-grained permissions that are actively maintained by users via Settings, not ToS.
Yes, I was wrong, and I see your point. The article says AI could be Apple's undoing, though, if it is able to deliver something far beyond what Apple can do.
Are you saying that even if this is the case, users will stick by Apple instead of abandoning their platform? Or that Apple will still be able to make enough on a diminished user base because of their privacy concerns?
The latter seems a little like RIM's strategy of marketing secure communications until they had no more market share.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#7> these AI services could be a socially awkward fad like Google Glass or a tonedeaf annoyance like Clippy
That's my general feeling about most things AI and "chat" these days. I see one or two useful applications, but no paradigm change on the horizon.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#8Hmm, I've never directly given Google a dollar, but I've spent thousands on Apple stuff primarily because they do not have big-data AI services. No company is perfect, but it's easy to see their priorities.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#9Oddly enough I find Apple's approach to AI more to my liking than Googles. When I do a voice query on Google and all of a sudden every ad on the device is related to what I just did, I feel abused.
I think the confusion here is the difference between data mining and AI. Google is great at data mining and less convincing when it comes to actual learning (Look at Alpha GO, it is an algorithmic exploit of a game, not a breakthrough).
I've been thinking recently that Google is the one with the losing approach. Personally, I have been using Bing a lot more because Google has been pushing the good results to page 2-3. Whatever their big AI is doing seems, at least for me, to not be working.
Re: Avoiding BlackBerry’s fate
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fine-grained permissions that are actively maintained by users via Settings, not ToS.
Yes, I was wrong, and I see your point. The article says AI could be Apple's undoing, though, if it is able to deliver something far beyond what Apple can do. Are you saying that even if this is the case, users will stick by Apple instead of abandoning their platform? Or that Apple will still be able to make enough on a diminished user base because of their privacy concerns? The latter seems a little like RIM's strat…
On the AI front, Apple of course needs to compete. But AI/statistics relies on a combination of signal and compute. If Apple can convince customers that they will honor customer consent signals (on-device permissions), they can gain cultural permission to mine data on the device, then send only a computed result to their servers for combination with public data/signals. They can add another custom processor on the device for user data analytics (there is already a motion co-processor).
Apple has a good track record of using marketing to sidestep technical limitations, although it remains to be seen if that can be maintained without Jobs. They were relatively early in marketing Siri (long before Echo), even if the execution has been weak.
It's a fallacy that AI requires loss of privacy. It's easy to forget that the most powerful general purpose computing object on the planet is the human brain. Any AI strategy must leverage this in some manner. Harvesting historical data is one tactic. There is no reason why we cannot create AI business models around consent and 1:1 delegation from AI to human, e.g. explicit permissions.
Apple seems well aware of the technical challenges in protecting privacy while training algorithms, e.g. Apple Maps only retains query data for 15 minutes, https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policie... . Past technical breakthroughs have come from constraints, let's hope Apple can recruit smart people up to the challenge of balancing privacy & AI.