Analysis: AI is How Google Wins (Premium)

Don’t let Google’s seemingly bland 2017 device lineup announcement from this past week undercut what’s really happening here. Google has, in fact, laid out its most serious devices challenge yet. And its competitors, especially Apple and Amazon, have no effective response.

I know. That sounds a tad hyperbolic. But hear me out.

The value of any digital device is tied to its usefulness. That is, the latest iPhone may or may not be pretty, opinions vary. But the core reason people purchase an iPhone is because of what it can do. The unlimited nature of its capabilities is somewhat breathtaking when you stop to think about it.

But the realm of what’s possible hasn’t really expanded in a while. As Google noted during its event this past week, phones … well, they’re sort of all the same. The same camera, the same processor, the same capabilities. The differences between each device have become minor.

It wasn’t always this way. When Apple announced the first iPhone in 2007, it completely reset our notion of what a phone could be. Yes, there were many, many limitations, it was the first version. But it was eye-opening.

In 2008, when Apple belatedly opened up iPhone to an app store, the bar was raised yet again. No longer were we limited to the then-still-amazing set of features that were available on the device itself. Now, the iPhone—and, soon, Android and the smartphone market generally—was an open-ended wonder, something that got better every time you downloaded an app or game.

Since then, there have been other innovations, some from Apple, many more from the Android world, centered around form factors, wireless charging, curved screens, and so on. But there really hasn’t been a true game changer since that original iPhone, or perhaps the App Store. It’s pretty much been a decade of evolution.

Now, finally, that is changing.

And the trigger for this sea-change, which I believe to be as momentous, if not more so, than the iPhone and the modern smartphone, is artificial intelligence, or AI.

Yeah, it’s kind of a buzz word. (Or phrase, whatever.) And yeah, every technology giant on earth—Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, whomever—is spouting AI, and related terms like machine learning and even quantum computing, at every turn, trying to establish themselves as forward-leaning and advanced.

But there are only a few firms that can lay claim to any deep-seated AI expertise at scale. In the cloud, we see companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And on the client, we see something very interesting. We see that the most successful AI companies, overall, are those that have a play there as well.

Amazon, for example, has been able to parlay its AI expertise into great success with its Alexa-based Echo smart speakers and, increasingly, other devices. But it’s been slowed by its mobile defeat, and has, I feel, a limited runway for future success. Echo is sitting pretty today, but it feels ephemeral.

Microsoft, likewise, has been foiled by mobile, so it can only advance its Cortana digital personal assistant and other AI-based clients in limited ways. PCs, a dwindling market. And in some mobile apps on competing platforms.

And then there’s Google. The only company that is hugely successful in both the cloud and on the client. Thanks to its dominant Android platform, Google is in a unique position to win the next wave of personal computing. Which is, as the firm claims, AI plus mobile plus cloud. But AI first.

“We are thinking all our core products, and working hard to solve user problems by applying machine learning and AI,” Google CEO Sundar Pinchai said during the opening of the event this past week.

Poor Apple.

Apple also touts its AI expertise, which should be laughable to anyone who has ever experienced it in action. Thanks to hubris—an aversion to “not invented here” technologies—a lack of sophisticated cloud services, and its ultra-conservative approach to personal privacy, Apple will never be a serious player in this next wave. It will survive solely on inertia, a massive built-in user base that, quite frankly, pretty much doesn’t even know any better at this point. The rest of us—the majority—can simply feel bad for them as the future opens up for us.

Put another way, Google has finally found the soft underbelly of Apple’s focus on devices. Which will increasingly just be attractive baubles that no longer provide that utility, that value, that we’ll see on the Android. iPhones and other Apple devices will still be useful, of course. They just will be more limited. Less useful.

On a related note, I was amused to hear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at his Ignite conference a few weeks back reference, poorly, a famous quote from industry seer Alan Kay. Mr. Kay had on hand at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs and a small team from Apple visited and walked away with the blueprint for GUI and mouse-based computing, stealing it for the first Mac.

In his heyday, Kay was a wellspring of quotable quotes—“the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” is my personal favorite—but the one that Jobs and now Nadella have carted out, again and again, is this little chestnut: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

Jobs was so serious about his respect for this view that he actually turned Alan Kay’s quote into his strategy for Apple in the 1990’s and 2000s. (Ironically, Kay, who worked at Apple in the late 1980’s after Jobs’ ouster, was not a fan.) Nadella is currently using it as his justification for Surface, Xbox, and possibly even future mobile devices. (Way to keep the remaining fans dangling on the hook.) But it’s more of a side-project at Microsoft, yet another way in which the cloud-focused software giant is still half-heartedly copying Apple.

Google has carted out the Kay quote, too, of course, to justify its devices push. But the difference between Google and Apple is that the search giant is now bringing truly powerful AI to bear. AI is making its devices—all of its devices—better as a result. In other words, it’s not about combining software and hardware. It’s about combining software, hardware, and AI.

This is something that Amazon and Microsoft can do at scale too, but they are both limited by mobile. And Apple? Apple cannot do it. Not with the sophistication and scale of Google. There is no version of this story where Google does not win.

In a future post, I’ll provide an overview of how Google is applying AI to each of the products it just announced. And why these advances are so impressive, and really do auger in a new age of computing.

But the short version is easily stated: The future is here. And for personal technology most especially, Google is leading the way.