Founders set the company culture, success ingrains that culture deep into a company's subconscious where it runs in the background regardless of whatever cultural reforms/artifacts are introduced - culture can only be changed when a new CEO (Jobs, Nadella) steps in and announces a huge change in culture, which usually stems from an otherwise unimaginable partnership (such as Apple/MSFT) that shows a concession to the realities of the market, which the company once thought it was above.
---
Author singles out Apple and Google as companies he is worried about WRT current culture.
Apple - threatened by "big data AI services": Author calls for Apple to partner with Microsoft to get access to cheap backend services (Azure) and/or frontend services (Siri + Cortana), ostensibly to play in Amazon AWS (compute as a service) and IBM Watson's (AI/marketing as a service) markets, respectively. Alternatively, Apple should open iOS to enable customers to muck around with the latest and greatest Android developments and set Google services as defaults on their iOS devices.
Google - threatened by users spending time on social apps: Should partner with Facebook by building a bot for Facebook Messenger and a backend for Facebook Messenger developers.
---
Questions/Comments
- It is unclear what unique advantages Apple would bring to the table for either the frontend/backend services market. Why break the intense in-house hardware/software coupling focus by leaning on MS for services? What backend services does Apple need to bring in-house through a partnership?
- What are the cool new Android services that iOS needs to integrate? I know the author says AI capabilities, but that is not a well-defined technology or use-case.
- I don't know a single person that likes using Facebook Messenger. Additionally, messaging applications have much, much lower barriers to entry than web browsers. Messenger is not comparable to Chrome. This is why Fbook purchased Whatsapp.
- Underlying premise: does Apple really need to play in the big data/AI space? Does Google really need to play in the social media space? Are these really going to be markets that drive future growth?