Nokia was well entrenched in the Mobile Phone business, and already had a highly optimized and battle tested OS for smartphones.
Microsoft was also in the business (WinCE, PocketPC, Windows Mobile)
And yet, the iPhone and later Android completely changed the market.
Same with Kodak, they basically invented digital photography, but they could not turn it into a business because they could not compete with their core business.
The suits would not allow it.
Search is ripe for disruption, and has been for years. Google search is a waay inferior product now than what it was a decade ago. Big business yes, but I would not bet on much loyalty.
A competing product does not have to instantly make billion dollars, they simply have to provide a better value for their users.
Blackberry, and cell carriers, loved the extra fees attached to Blackberry Phone planes.
Meanwhile I'd guess w/o looking that Apple makes more money from their app store % cut than Blackberry ever did from however much BBM cost to add on to a cell plan.
Microsoft was too attached their success with the OEM Windows model (OEMs make hardware, pay MS licensing fee for OS) to realize things were changing. Google adjusted MS's winning business model of the 90s and threw in ads, while Apple finally realized obscene levels of success with the business model they'd been using since the 1980s. (Not to say the Apple II wasn't an earlier success of the same business model, but obviously many orders of magnitude less).
A mobile OS takes 5 -10 years to develop and you ha e to onboard developers and commercial organisations like banks.
Chat GPT needs no partner relatuonship and Google could have equivalent public product in 2 months. Both are just stealing public content someone else has peoduced.
So nice that law protecrs ChatGPT sourcecode but not the authors of training material
Again, you are missing the point. ChatGPT has no moat, certainly not against Google.
The day first iPhone was released, Nokia management didn't know this will be big. Most of the world didn't.
By the time their sales were hurting, and Nokia management woke up, there were many years of development to catch up on.
None of this applies here. Google already has an equivalent to ChatGPT internally and could release it any day. ChatGPT doesn't have some unique data thay Google is lacking, so what's gonna stop them?
Google lacks competence to create any product that’s not adTech.
I didn’t say it can’t create the technology. There is a huge difference in the competence that it takes to develop software and the competence it takes to create a profitable product that needs vision, patience and strong leadership.
And something as messaging apps require neither. Yet Google can’t bring a decent one to market and introduced three incompatible products in one year even though it has the worlds most popular mobile operating system.
What profitable products have all of their brilliance abd money brought to the world outside of adTech?
It came out in the Oracle trial that Android only made Google a total of around $23 billion in profit total by 2016. All indication is that Google pays more to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS than it makes on Android.
Apple had most of the OS in place when the project began. That's why, to this day, a bunch of iOS APIs start with "Nx."
Also, the reason the App Store appeared overnight was that they had been planning to use it for the as-yet-unannounced iPad all along. It was almost ready to go when the iPhone was announced; all they had to do was pivot away from the moronic "Web apps only" strategy they had been pushing for the iPhone.
So hopefully (for Google) they are in a similar position, with years of work already done. We'll find out.
The scenario is different. This would be like if Nokia had the Lumia running Windows Phone, meanwhile they're selling Symbian phones and Apple introduces the iPhone. Surely they'd just launch their Lumia, no?
If Google didn't already have both more experience in language models, experimental demos like ChatGPT (Lambda, and Meena) and more data, then I'd agree with the article.
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If ChatGPT was a fully generalized "general AI", then yes Google would be seriously in trouble as Google does not have an equivalent.
This would be like if Nokia had the Lumia running Windows Phone, meanwhile they're selling Symbian phones and Apple introduces the iPhone. Surely they'd just launch their Lumia, no?
No. Nokia had a (770, 800, 810, N900) smartphone and self-sabotaged it because it didn't want to cannibalize its Symbian business.
If Google had a reputation for maintaining projects long term and successfully and if their experimental AI models got even 1% of the hype and attention these quietly launched and massively covered and functional models like ChatGPT got, I’d think you had a point.
And yet, the iPhone and later Android completely changed the market.
Same with Kodak, they basically invented digital photography, but they could not turn it into a business because they could not compete with their core business.
The suits would not allow it.
Search is ripe for disruption, and has been for years. Google search is a waay inferior product now than what it was a decade ago. Big business yes, but I would not bet on much loyalty.
A competing product does not have to instantly make billion dollars, they simply have to provide a better value for their users.