They simply believe that iOS + cloud is a better way to compute.
At WWDC. I won't say anything specific, but I'm beginning to think that Apple's business model is/has been to take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
Basically, Apple has been in the business of arbitrage of R&D awesomeness. (As opposed to the most common use of R&D as a corporate epeen.) Considering there's decades of unimplemented (or badly implemented) good ideas, this seems like a sustainable model.
>take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
If this is true, then that is also google's model, except they're doing it with server-side algorithms as opposed to UI implementations/hardware form factors.
You don't think google invented MapReduce, their translation algos, their vision algos, their concurrency models and so on? They get them out of research papers from years gone by. Then they implement them at real-world scale, and iterate them until they're suitably awesome, just like apple does with the ideas they resurrect from academia.
This is analogous to how every perceived leap forward in programming paradigms always seems to end up dating back to 1956.
I think you would see this pattern with every hugely successful company. Microsoft took the work that happened in the 70s to make personal computing possible and developed a business around it at the point it was ready for huge growth.
It is rarely good for a startup to be on the absolute bleeding edge of an industry, but if you can catch the tipping point[0] (and execute well), you have pretty much guaranteed success.
At WWDC. I won't say anything specific, but I'm beginning to think that Apple's business model is/has been to take all the awesome stuff that people developed in research labs since the 60's, and they're implementing it when/where it makes sense.
Basically, Apple has been in the business of arbitrage of R&D awesomeness. (As opposed to the most common use of R&D as a corporate epeen.) Considering there's decades of unimplemented (or badly implemented) good ideas, this seems like a sustainable model.