“Something has changed in 2016. As the smartphone growth era winds down and we begin to look for the next big thing in tech, there has been a surge in pessimism pointed towards Apple’s business model,” Neil Cybart writes for Above Avalon. “With many of Silicon Valley’s software and services giants doubling down on their core competencies and becoming more vocal as to where technology may be headed, one thing is clear: No one wants to be Apple.”
“Apple peers are now becoming much more vocal that it is time we move beyond hardware and focus on the services and networks running on hardware,” Cybart writes. “No one wants anything to do with Apple’s hardware business.”
“Instead of wanting to be like Apple by doing hardware and getting into brick and mortar retail, Silicon Valley is now infatuated with data and the services meant to capture such valuable data,” Cybart writes. “As Apple envy winds down in Silicon Valley and Apple peers no longer see the allure of being like Apple, Tim Cook and the executive team are familiar with finding ways to prove skeptics wrong. The next big thing after the smartphone has not yet been figured out, and Apple has a few ideas on where it thinks the puck is headed. While everyone is headed in one direction, Apple thinks the intersection of technology and liberal arts will be found in a different place. ”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No one wants to own 95+% of the pocketable personal computer market’s profits? Of course they do. It’s just that they’ve (Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, etc.) all failed miserably. It’s not that they don’t to be Apple, it’s that they now know they can’t.
That said, there are certainly questions about where and how Apple wants to go next. Hopefully, we’ll find out quite a bit about that at what promises to be a jam-packed WWDC this year!
