Netizen

Saturday, January 12, 2019

Could Steve Jobs Have Made A Difference At Apple in 2020?

This is one of those what-ifs. There is Larry Ellison, the colorful Founder CEO of Oracle, best friend to Steve Jobs for 25 years, who will have you believe Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. Tim Cook can not wear the shoes. It is true Apple has since only been milking what was already built. They are still milking the iPhone and the iPad.

It is said Steve Jobs was thinking about tackling the TV next. If you go from the PC to the iPod-iPhone-iPad, it is a paradigm shift from the GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the touch screen. But do you really want to touch your TV? TV was and is a harder nut to crack. The innovation perhaps is not on the screen. It is in how content is created and distributed. Netflix, and YouTube and Amazon are tackling some of it.

It is true Steve Jobs managed to be a pioneer for both GUI and the touch screen. But what's next? Obviously we are looking beyond touch. They talk of NUI, Natural User Interface. Voice commands. Gesture, things like that. Computing is so seamlessly integrated to the natural environment around you, you simply speak to it, or you wave at it.

Could Steve Jobs have tackled it? It is not like you are saying, Steve Jobs grew up speaking English, could he have beat the Chinese at Mandarin? Steve Jobs would not have been handicapped by the NUI. But it might have been hard for the same person to also be the pioneer for that third paradigm. It is remarkable enough that one person became the master of two paradigms. Three? Three would have been a lot. But it was possible.

Steve Jobs' Apple had almost a hundred billion dollars in the bank. Jobs liked to say he liked to keep his gunpowder dry, in case something showed up. Perhaps things like VR and AR are more capital intensive. Perhaps not.

It is conceivable Apple under Steve Jobs might have also been a leader in this next emerging paradigm, the paradigm of the Natural User Interface. Tim Cook is already missing out. Tim Cook is more like Steve Ballmer. Ballmer kept showing crazy good numbers. But he totally missed out on the smartphone. Cook is similarly showing pretty good numbers. But it is Google and Amazon that are Hey Google! and Hello Alexa!

VR is going to be amazingly democratizing. Before VR you have bought a TV for hudreds of dollars. In a VR headset, a TV is maybe a one dollar app. Suddenly a dollar a day people might be looking at high end TV. And it can be a tremendous educational tool. Super-customized education.