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Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though? All those giants have their own business that are established and profitable.Ah! Well, if we put aside "The Innovator's Dilemma" and pick up Reis and Trout's "marketing Warfare," we get the answer. Apple does have an existing business, but investing in AI does not cannibalize it. They can throw money at it, try to find a way to make it work really, really well for consumers on very specific custom hardware in their devices...
Likewise, someone like Google has all the money in the world to throw at it, but they aren't investing in a new market, they're defending their search business against everyone just asking a generative AI Chatbot questions. I\But it's possible for them to screw this up internally over turf wards, just ask the engineers who tried to make search better but were kneecapped by Prabhakar Raghavan who demanded that search be poor enough to drive people to click sponsored results.
In the "Marketing Warfare" model, Apple is attempting a flanking attack: An outsider trying to disrupt the AI giants with an approach that they can't imitate without undermining their value proposition. On-device AI flanks the big giants that areservcie-centric.
And in that model, Google is playing defence, which is what every leader is supposed to do. Their job is to "cover every move," which they are doing in textbook fashion. If AI goes away, Google dry their tears and continue to mine ad revenue.