Apple could be the first of FAMGA to die. Die, in the same way Nokia and Blackberry are dead. The one thing Apple does is sell personal computing devices (and accessories to them), the unique and most valuable part of which is the OS.
There has been a continuous abstraction of things by the cloud, beginning with files.That, and the fact of cloud storage becoming a commodity has resulted in reasonable prediction by some people of the impending death of companies offering personal cloud storage as a service.
Video gaming is already being experimented on. Cc Google Stadia.
I think at some point in the near future, mobile OSes too will either be abstracted away — with apps streamed in real-time, like we currently stream music on Spotify or TV on Netflix — or completely die, giving way to the web (which we already 'stream' in real-time) as the only platform.
If mobile OSes die, then Apple probably dies. Everything else Apple does is appended to personal computing. Other tech coys have lock-in with some of their products and services. Apple is a big company; a bureaucracy like any other. When the change happens, no one who will be at the company will have enough consolidated power to perform a re-founding of the company. Reed Hastings' founder re-founding of Netflix is a famous success. There is no Reed Hastings at Apple.
If mobile OSes are only abstracted away to the cloud, then Apple's OS would be in competition with the web, which has more 'content'. Accessing the web on Apple's devices would require an additional level: Physical device —> Cloud mobile OS —> Web browser in the cloud. Compared to the web as the platform, in which things only move from Physical device --> Web.
Aside the difficulty of the specific problems of founding and re-founding, there are also other related, general systemic reasons to be pessimistic about their chances of surviving this inflection point:
(i) The fact that functional institutions are the exception.
(ii) Success is really really difficult to achieve; a ton of things have to go exactly right.
Love it. But I'm convinced it is closer to: everything that does not survive, dies for a reason.
— Joe Norman (@normonics) February 16, 2018
Survival demands a multitudinous harmony; ruin, only one sour note.
Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) November 4, 2019
Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back.
Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work.
Necessary, but not sufficient.
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Notes -
The idea of running your OS in the cloud is the same old "thin client" scheme that has been the Next Big Thing for 40 years. Ever since PCs started replacing terminals, some people have been convinced we must RETVRN.
The thin client approach seems appealing for two reasons. First, it centralizes administration. Second, it allows shared use of pooled computing resources. In practice, neither of these quite works.
A platform like iOS or modern macOS actually imposes almost no per-device administrative overhead. System and app updates get installed automatically. Devices can be configured and backed up remotely. The OS lives on a "sealed" system volume where it's extremely unlikely to be compromised or corrupted. There's still some per-user administrative overhead — the configuration of a particular user's environment can be screwy — but a cloud-based OS still has per-user state, so does nothing to address this.
Pooling resources is great for cases where you want access to a lot of resources, but there's no need to go full-cloud for this. Devices that run real operating systems can access remote resources just fine. The benefit of going full-cloud is hypothetically that your end-user devices can be cheaper if they don't need the hardware to run a full OS... but the cost difference between the hardware required by a thin client and the hardware required to run a full OS is now trivial.
Meanwhile, the thin client approach will always be hobbled by connectivity, latency, bandwidth, and privacy concerns. Connectivity is especially critical on mobile, where Apple makes most of its money. Latency is especially critical in emerging categories like VR/AR, where Apple is looking to expand.
The future is more compute in the cloud and more compute at the edge. There's no structural threat to Apple here.
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