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Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back?

My ideas:

- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.

- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API.

- Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.

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Apple had a huge head start with Siri but has been surpassed quite handily by Google and Amazon for some time now. I'm not sure we can simply rely on the passage of time for Apple to improve these large projects.

On the other hand, Google had a huge head start in developing robust voice recognition with GOOG-411. Whereas Alexa and Siri are more or less at parity, from what I've heard.

But, I own neither an Echo, nor an Android, and I'm still running iOS 6 on an iPhone 4S.

I think a big part of this, at least when compared to google, is Siri's issues with language understanding rather than converting the audio to text. Google is much better at picking up on contextual details simply because they have such a huge background in doing so for search.

About 3GW of computing power. No really.

Apple lacks the raw computing capacity to be able to pull this off, even if they had the algorithms and data already.

With their cash pile, they could surely expand, considering the long term returns on such expansion of computing power. Maybe Apple just dosent see the need to improve or dosent see any revenue potential with Maps.

Apple is actually paying for Google's capacity.

http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-stra...

Apple's forte is not high-caliber software engineering, or scaling huge infrastructure, as is the case at AWS/GCP. Apple's track record in recent years is pretty shoddy, and downright embarrassing in the last several months.

This Internet / Web software services weakness goes all the way back for Apple. Jobs was constantly frustrated at how mediocre Apple's results were in that area (in my opinion I don't think he was very good at cultivating that area in terms of his expertise or skill).

It's extremely difficult for a company to be good at many things. I'd be skeptical there's anything Apple can ever do to be good at their hardware object core (hardware + OS) and Internet services. iTunes has sucked for years, they either don't care or can't do anything about it. How did Spotify take the lead in streaming services? Why didn't they understand to acquire Netflix for streaming when it was tiny? Same fundamental reason, Apple isn't very good at Internet services.

Siri, iTunes, streaming (which is doing ok), Apple Maps, MobileMe, Ping, these are all the same problem. They mostly got the App Store right, to their credit.

For me the App Store is one of the worst apps on iOS. Just look at how many complain about its poor search results. I just skip them and use Google to search for iOS apps.

Apple really didn't get it in the Jobs days. For quite a while, Cupertino's built-in Google Maps app sent traffic to two Netscalers in California that Apple managed, no matter where your iPhone was. That was definitely not Google's idea. As you can imagine, hilarity of all kinds did ensue.

One way around that would be to start a new subsidiary that is mandated to focus on services, hire good people to run it, dont list it till its profitable and support it financially. Atleast that is one way to overcome the too big to innovate type weaknesses.

>Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.

So you expect Google to stand around for 3 or more years while Apple comes close to parity with Google today?

My heuristic is that it's usually faster to catch-up to something that already exists than it is to invent something new. Given sufficient effort Apple should be able to asymptotically approach Google's capabilities. But considering the other two points I mentioned, it's not a given that they will.

> what is holding Apple back?

If you worked at Apple would you want to be working on Apple Maps? I just doubt any of the core talents in Apple are interested in it at all, it's not what the company is known for.

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