Siri Was Always Going to Fail (Premium)

A credible report explaining how Apple failed to capitalize on being first-to-market with Siri has triggered some fan fiction. Guys, please. Siri was always going to fail.

News about Siri’s early days at Apple comes courtesy of The Information, which reported this week that the consumer electronics giant squandered its technological advantage, giving Amazon, Google, and other digital personal assistant makers time to catch up with, and then surpass, Siri.

The Information, if you’re unfamiliar, is a very expensive paid publication—the cheapest price is $39 per month—so you may need to search around a bit to find a summary. I will only provide the basics here, since I obviously need to respect such efforts. But the reaction of the Apple faithful is, to me, the bigger story anyway.

Put simply, Siri wasn’t created by Apple: Instead, Apple acquired the company that made it and rushed to integrate Siri with the iPhone 4S, which shipped in late 2011. It was always horrifically buggy and limited, even from the get-go. But then things got worse.

“Siri was a disaster,” Richard Williamson, who oversaw Sir development at Apple in 2011-2012, told the publication. “It was slow, when it worked at all. The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me.”

Self-serving, for sure. But with Williamson fired alongside Jobs honcho Scott Forstall the following year (both were also responsible for Apple Maps), Siri development simply came to a halt. Apple eventually woke up, created SiriKit to attract third-party developers, and pushed to advance the technology. But by then, Amazon’s Alexa had shocked the world with its success. And of course, Google entered the market and now it’s pretty much game over. Apple’s belated inclusion of Siri in a single smart speaker, the HomePod, is routinely cited as the single worst thing about that product.

This report has generated some interesting navel-gazing over in Apple-land. For example, Mashable reported that Apple “let” Siri fall behind Google Assistant and Alexa, as if those services wouldn’t have been successful regardless. Meanwhile, the more hardcore Apple blogs are refuting The Information’s inside access to ex-Apple employees with their usual blend of blind faith and surety.

“Siri is failing all the way to the bank,” one particularly pathetic example (which, no, I will not link to) explains, while proudly predicting great Siri advances to come. “Don’t expect the company to devote major competitive efforts toward replicating the extremely low-value Amazon Skills ecosystem that offers users little more than a more clumsy way to use apps without looking at them (the way Google has blindly, desperately tried to copy Alexa).”

Yep. He really wrote that.

So here’s the deal. Siri was always going to fail. It was just a matter of time.

Yes, that time frame was compressed, in part by Amazon’s shocking leap to the forefront of this market. This still confuses many, but it triggered a gargantuan and equally aggressive push by Google. Again, game over.

Had Apple somehow gotten its Siri act together in 2012 and continued development, evolving it into, let’s say, a less embarrassing service, Apple would have enjoyed the same level of success it always obtains: Success with the home crowd, people who live to buy the next iPhone every year.

But even within the context of that insular market, Apple still would have lost: A successful Siri would have triggered the same response from Google that Alexa did in real life: This type of service is, after all, Google’s forte. It is most certainly not Apple’s.

Here’s why.

When we look at today’s market for digital personal assistants, we see the need for two core strengths: Cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) smarts and on-device AI smarts. Apple probably does a great job at the latter—and it pushes this notion in the way it brands its latest chipsets—but it is almost absent entirely from the former.

Microsoft and Amazon, meanwhile, have great strengths in cloud-based AI, but almost no (or at least no meaningful) on-ramp for devices. Microsoft at least has Windows PCs on which to play. Amazon is adrift, and it can rely only on a comparatively tiny base of Echo devices. This is Amazon’s Achilles Heel.

But there is one company that has great reach and great strength in both areas: Google. In fact, this is where Google’s decision to provide iPhone and iPad users with first-rate Google experiences that rival those on its own platforms really pays off. Google Assistant, as it turns out, isn’t just better than Siri. It’s better than Siri on Apple’s own products.

Oops.

But we can’t blame Tim Cook, Richard Williamson, Scott Forestall, or the original Siri team for that. Instead, we can only credit Google, which was going to steamroll over Apple’s lackluster entry no matter what they did. Google’s dominance was preordained.

So, please. Tell your stories. Make yourself feel better about what might have been. But Siri? No. It was never going to win.