Peak tech?
06/16/2013
Apple will never again come out with a product as transformative as the iPhone. Google will never build anything more useful than its existing search engine… . And Facebook … won’t ever be anything more than a place we share photos and links.
Interesting arguments… and I think I agree.
Remember when Apple wasn’t going to make anything more revolutionary than the Apple 2. Or the Mac. Or the iPod?
It’s not easy to break beyond a successful product, but it’s possible. It’s just really hard. That’s why it’s fun working in Google [x]. We have a really really hard goal.
Right, but I think that’s the point of the argument: a) it’s really hard to do, and even if you can do it, b) it generally puts the business into a fundamentally different space, and many businesses aren’t equipped to deal with that shift.
In Google X’s case, it’s not clear to me where Google Glass will fall (assuming it succeeds in the marketplace in any meaningful way) in Google’s current business model, which is search and ads.
Of all the examples cited above, I believe Apple is the only one that really successfully shifted its business model away from Macs and Mac OS X to [mobile] iDevices and iOS.