If Apple were truly serious about building self-driving cars, they would buy one of the big 3 US auto manufacturers. It could buy all 3 with cash and still have one of the largest hoards of cash ever accumulated.
Echo is a consequence of exploring digital appliances as marketing tools. If you're going to build a device which can voice-interface someone ordering 6 bottles of Tide with extreme ease, doesn't take much more to turn it into a nice music speaker and tell you weather & sports & jokes on request. Echo, Fire, etc are just extensions to feeding the retailing monster.
Do notice how Amazon's innovative foray into cell phones crashed & burned hard - despite being lauded as rather a well-built device. That shows how straying too far doesn't work, and that "far" isn't very.
It's easy to point to one failed product as proof that "straying too far doesn't work", if you can do the mental gymnastics required to classify all their successful products as somehow more connected to their original goal.
While the hardware division was indeed shut down, Amazon did manage to salvage as much as they can.
The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else. It took a lot of focused investment, commitment and trust from the management to give the AWS experiment more time so that it could succeed and eventually it did.
Fire phone was one of Amazon's many experiments. It failed sure, but hey you miss 100% of the changes you don't take.
Just a minor point of correction: Actually SQS was first.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-blog-the-first-five-yea...
"a logistics business, both information and physical"? Really? Calling their massive retail business, original content, and physical devices an "accessory" to their warehousing is an extremely myopic view of Amazon.
Google Cloud is about ensuring that those two have competition and can't somehow pull an EEE. Extreme scenario: vast majority of world's online businesses are hosted on AWS and Amazon for whatever reason creates their own AWS ad service and forbids or undercuts Google AdWords for everything hosted on AWS.
This is the first time I've seen it shortened to an acronym.
Shipping, motor vehicles, home electronics, bank and finance (UFJ holdings), nuclear power, cameras and optics (Nikon), industrial chemistry, beer brewing (Kirin) and real estate.
EDIT: Samsung does all sorts of things including ship-building, life insurance, construction and advertising.
For example, Apple MacBook Pros have become uncool, expensive, unrepairable and impractical... a giant FU to customers. That business is tettering on failure because they've been hypnotized on elixir of utopian, aspirational design rather than technical, environmental and practical usability. iPhone is the lion's share of Apple's business, and they're losing ground to Android. That's a problem and most other products have plateaued and aren't anywhere near as dominant-capable or category-defining as the smartphone. That means Apple is a basically a banana republic (pun intended) unless they create or retake a category with a non-incrementalist product.
Disclaimer: I own an A1278 13" from 2013 but refuse to buy a $3000 soldered on RAM and SSD laptop that can't be transfered without proprietary service tools and whose glued-on batteries are a PITA to change. Also the low-travel, flush keyboards are terrible. Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.
They sold over 4 million Macs this past quarter, so I don't know what you're going on about here.
Well, they're down YoY, from 4.2 million to... 4.18 million. So in another 200 years, they'll have all disappeared.
Citation required. (other than you refusing to buy one).
> Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.
Please don't do System76, their laptops are pieces of crap. My wife and I have had good experiences with thinkpads though.
You can't compare a conglomerate to an integrated company.
Cars are more about mechanical engineering than electronics or software. Learning automotive design from scratch when you have no experience and barely any trained staff is not a trivial task.
Worse, a Level 5 autonomous car is not an existing consumer technology. At this point there's nothing to refine, and barely anything that could be bought in to start the refinement process.
Apple might as well go into house building, farming, or food products.
Besides, Apple doing the iPod and iPhone is a counter example to your argument, unless you stretch the definition of the core business of a Y2K computer company to be music players and phones.
Manufacturing scale is not something they need until after they have the self driving tech (and also, I'd just partner with a Japanese or German automaker tbh. Toyota under the current CEO has made moves that hint that it would be open to a joint venture).
The main differentiator of current big auto is the engine and drivetrain engineering, which you can circumvent when going electric.
It's unclear what you're buying with a big 3 company that actually helps with the self driving part of the problem, which is currently a much larger problem than manufacturing scale and quality assurance.
- constrictive agreements with dealers
- rapidly deprecating manufacturing assets
- a workforce with sunk costs in last generation skills
- a warranty burden on old vehicles
- pensions and other union agreements
- a beloved brand that the public may not be happy seeing chewed up and regurgitated as iTaxi Supplier 4A
If you believe in an autonomous and electric near future, some of these companies should have Yahoo-style negative valuations.
Often a unionized workforce. You didn't want to use more robots on your assembly lines like Elon Musk, did you? Because these guys are still going to be employed. Period.
However, knowledge in cars definitely helps building the technology, since there are so many little variables that you otherwise would oversee.
Apple and Silicone valley in general is not a trusted partner, in fact they are the opposite: untrusted. Car manufactures have lost millions of dollars on safety lawsuits. The cowboy coding culture silicon valley has a reputation (not always deserved) for doesn't work, they need controlled processes where they can show the courts they made effort to check everything, starting with the design phase.
Car makers expect that they will be sued over a 10 year old car with some parts failing. They need to show the court they did everything possible to anticipate that exact failure case and either ensure it couldn't happen, or if it they handle it. When someone is dead, "we didn't think about that case" doesn't cut it.
In short, I don't think Apple or google will get anywhere in self driving cars. They have early demonstrations, but that doesn't mean anything long term. It doesn't even prove they have an early lead (though I suspect they do) since car companies might or might not say anything about where they are. In fact in this case I expect them to be very careful not to say anything: if they say to much a lawyer might argue the car should have been self driving and thus the car manufacture is fault for an accident. As such they need to set expectations that self driving cars are a future thing that isn't ready yet.
Besides being a poor investment that would lock up lots of their capital, it would also create a ton of management distractions.
If they are serious about building self-driving cars, they are probably making a huge mistake. Cars have been a poor business model for quite a long time. Licensing automonomous tech seems like a far better business model.
But as far as low margins in the car industry goes, that point is irrelevant. Robotaxis are a different ballgame.
I think you're right that when we get self-driving cars it won't be due to a single secret, but rather hundreds of years of engineering time dedicated to getting all the kinks out.
But this is still a super complicated engineering problem, and not all people/orgs will be up to the task, and will not execute on the same timescales.
I think the way this plays out will be determined by how much of a lead the first movers (probably WayMo) will have, and whether companies will cut corners to get something "good enough" out the door, and how the public will react to that.
E.g. I think it's a very different world for automakers if WayMo turns out to have a 5 year lead on them, vs a 1 year lead on them. Cruise certainly looks like they are giving them a good run for their money.
PCs and phones are low-margin capital intensive businesses. Apple seems pretty good at commanding high margins in such industries.
As for why Apple doesn't license their tech, well, that's not how Apple operates, because then they lose control over the experience. ROKR and the like.
Apple has made great margins in PCs and Phones because it refused to use commodity operating systems. It's not clear that there is any similar advantage in cars. Everyone will be making autonomous cars, the markets will be highly competitive and they'll still require massive capital investments to make. It's unlikely customers will pay up much for a slightly better autonomous system.
If Apple wanted to go into cars, they should buy Porshe or Ferrari. They actually have brands that make their products difficult or impossible to copy well. Porsche in particular sells cares that are super highly engineered in every area, Apple can't create a Porsche like car business by selling an autonomous car by doing autonomous great, but ride, handling, acceleration, etc just acceptably
You can sell a car for a lot more if it's being rented out for 12 driving hours per day. Especially so if it's a high end experience. People have a hard time shelling out $60,000 for a car when they could get something pretty adequate for $30,000, but when the choice is a $2 cab ride or a $4 luxury cab ride, a lot more people will pay the margin.
But when the cab ride is a more realistic $25, and a luxury cab ride $50, most people will go for the $25 option. See Uber Black vs Uber X.
Worse, the people who use their car in the middle of the day are the least likely to use shared cars. They are the most likely to need a change of clothing, a stroller in their car just in case. They are also the most likely to run back and for from their car for each purchase at the mall.
What that leaves is people going to/from work, and their lunch breaks. At this point you may as well own your own car self driving car: at worst it is not much more expensive (shared might be 10% cheaper), and you get to leave your golf clubs in the car while at work. At best you can ignore a few tears and keep the car for longer making owning your own car cheaper than a shared car which needs to maintain appearance and cleanliness standards.
Shared cars work well for those people who rarely use a car. However those are the people who already are renting cars, using taxis and the like for the few times they need a car.
Why cant Apple Ireland buy US companies?