Meta isn’t even in the top 20 most valuable U.S. companies
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I’ve been watching for a while for it to drop below Costco ($COST 219.8B). Won’t be long now. I look forward us acknowledging that Zuck was merely lucky, not some visionary.
Isn't that already acknowledged in the tech circles?
I guess all those people tethered to their phones 24/7 won't experience much of a change.
That being said, I'm glad to see them sinking and hope they take the rest of social media down with them, for the sake of humanity.
One can only hope that Google (no innovation whatsoever, creepy) and Amazon (despicable dehumanizing machine) are next in line.
Google search is so ripe for disruption that I can't wait to see it dismantled by the first serious contender.
Software/hardware integration as well.
Hardware design is surely top notch.
Supply chain management.
They've pushed smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and wireless earbuds to the masses, and turned them into product categories that rival or exceed Mac computer sales.
They don't get the features right all the time. Their software is rotting over time because users can't ogle it the way they can ogle hardware. The push for fake innovation, like wireless buds and eSIM, is slowly driving me insane. They constantly hide behind "eco-friendliness" when they make customer hostile decisions, like sticking with a proprietary Apple-only charging port and removing charging bricks from iphone boxes.
But goddamn they have had an innovative past 15 years.
I simply do not care about deep learning and NLP advancements. They invariably end up used to recommend me more garbage that I do not want. The only "ML" feature I can think of that's made my life any better? Facial recognition in Google Photos, because it's easy to find pictures of a specific person or animal. But that still mixes people up routinely, and is by no means comprehensive. Not to mention the fact that it's likely used to profile and track me behind the scenes at Google. I could take it or leave it.
I prefer DSLR pictures to smartphone photos, so I don't really care about ML image processing pipelines in phones much. Maybe night sight counts as an advancement, but I don't use it. Again -- DSLR, if I care about the photos at all.
The Pixel phones have some neat "ML" features, like instant translation and mostly-good transcription, that are definitely neat. But I'm not convinced that those matter much to me.
Cloud orchestration innovations have surely happened, but again, I'm not convinced they're a net good for the world. Kubernetes? Sure, it's impressive. In some cases it's damn useful. But it's also a great way to overcomplicate cloud machine management. Most smaller companies would probably do better with physical machines, cutting the cloud out entirely.
TL;DR: I can feel and see Apple's innovations. Google's are usually more indirect... and even when I can see them, I'm not convinced they're true useful advancement. They often feel like gimmicks.