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 -
Apple is as much a jewelry store as it is a manufacturer of personal electronics. The Iphone fulfills much the same roll in modern society as the gold watch with diamond accents did 100+ years ago. There were tons of much cheaper watches that told time just as well, often better. For the people that bought the gold watches it wasn't about having accurate or reliable time pieces. Its about other people knowing they had a gold watch. Apple is not that much different. I've known people that lug around older iphones that don't have service, much like some people 100 years ago didn't even bother to wind their watches. The average iphone user uses a tiny fraction of the devices capabilities: text, social media, calls. Features available on phones at 1/8 the price, yet they do not want those cheaper phones at all. Apple will be fine barring some other luxury status symbol electronics maker challenging their spot. Their average customer has no idea what an "operating system" even is.
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