Apple's AI Challenger Sale
What stood out to me in yesterday’s Apple announcement wasn’t the headline, but the subtitle.
“Setting a new standard in privacy.”
For privacy to become one of the leading selling points of software, competitive dynamics & user preferences have evolved.
The mantra repeated over the last 20 years on the internet has been privacy is dead. Users simply don’t care. People are willing to trade their privacy for free & targeted experiences.
Since 2020, Apple has marketed their products as the private alternativepoking fun at how public we all are about the minutia of our lives.
Apple is competing using the challenger sale : Apple is telling the market, to use AI, you should want private AI, you should want to control your own data because it’s valuable1. Apple’s massive distribution will affect consumer & enterprise preferences.
It’s already happening. Enterprises push for their data to be under their control in virtual private clouds, in open data formats like Iceberg, to run AI models in their own environments - the cloud-prem architecture. These models are their intellectual property & a key competitive advantage.
We’ve all learned Google’s core search business - arguably the best business model on the internet - is the commercialization of a machine learning algorithm from user & enterprise data. Fool me once…
The broader market has realized how valuable data can be - both users who provide it & businesses who leverage it.
These changing preferences will create demand for new architectures : software products that run in customer environments where the data remains in control of the user & buyer. This architectural shift creates a massive new opportunity for software startups to challenge the multi-tenant, centralized data incumbents with their own privacy-focused challenger sale.
1Many will debate whether the architecture is truly private. Is Apple using secure enclaves & SGXs, OpenAI promising not to log queries from Apple users, & users opting-in to sending their data to OpenAI private enough? Will Google rearchitect Gemini to do the same thing to power Apple products?
Global VP of Partnerships @ Glean / Asana, Nerdwallet alum / Wharton MBA
9 个月Enterprises are becoming more and more conscious of these architectures and want to know exactly where and how their data is being used. Good thing Glean is single tenant and can be hosted in the customer’s environment!
Seed stage venture capital investor in future of work, marketplaces, SaaS, and AI
9 个月Agree. This is pretty interesting.
Portfolio CEO | AI-Powered Enterprise Software
9 个月Do you think Apple is also delicately using fear here to motivate behaviour?
techno~optimist
9 个月Jason Fried, this small article by Tomasz Tunguz highlights the exact same trend that you're surfing with ONCE products (!) It's happening in front of our eyes...
Building AI Factories, Open Source & Cloud Native
9 个月Smarter, autonomous key management is ... key. Between PQ3 for iMessage and now PCC for SLM<->LLM secure/private edge to core distributed apps, Apple has created a 21st century client-server reference architecture ripe for a startup to popularize outside iCloud: L1 - secure silicon (with TPMs) L2 - secure data center networking L3 - secure routing L4 - secure sessions via biometrics and enclaves (TPMs) L7 - secure apps I'm more excited than ever to apply the Autonomous Cyber Systems roadmap in this now well-publicized regard! ??