The race for innovation

What company will win the race for innovation? For a long time, I was certain that it would be Apple. Apple creates stylish, sleek and functional products and there is a popular belief that it has a cult-like following. Apple cleaned the clocks of brands, such as Nokia & Blackberry, to a point where most people have forgotten these once leading brands.  Steve Jobs created groundbreaking and truly revolutionary products. Like the iPod, which allowed tens of thousands of songs that you could carry in your pocket and that truly transformed the way we all listen to music. Later in 2007, the iPhone was introduced. It basically shrunk a desktop computer into a phone, giving users access to everything on the desktop. Then along came the iPad in 2010, it was a nimble alternative to the laptop. Since Jobs passed away(may he rest in peace) in 2011, Apple hasn't introduced any new revolutionary products. Instead, Apple now tinkers with models, sizes, and colors. Apple sells five different models of its iPhone in six colors and in multiple sizes. I know what you are thinking right about now, what about the iPhone X, I mean it has facial recognition and an OLED display.  Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple, thinks it’s no big deal. Wozniak said that he was happy with his iPhone 8, which is the same as the iPhone 7, which is the same as the iPhone 6 to him, he says. He says he'll wait and see what happens. He did, however, mention that his wife was upgrading to the iPhone X, so obviously he's going to check it out more thoroughly.Steve Jobs was a genius with a long-term strategy, as illustrated by his vision for introducing Apple IIs to school systems. The strategy locked in a generation of Apple fans, making it easier for them to migrate to other Apple products, such as the iPad, iPod & iPhone. Fast forward to the present where Google and Amazon are forming that relationship with kids. Kids are learning to use Google and Echo devices and Alexa platform by using voice commands instead of typing.

Remember that Steve Jobs seeded schools with Apple II computers set the platform for Apple’s success. Now, it appears that Google has taken a page out of Apple's playbook. How might you ask? Google's Chromebook has a whopping 58% market share in K-12 schools. A Chromebook is a cloud-based computer that uses Google’s software. Chromebook sales have exploded in a market that Apple used to totally dominate, that being K-12 schools. Google has transformed public education and outmaneuvered Apple and Microsoft with low-cost laptops and apps. Google was able to accomplish this feat by enlisting teachers and administrators to promote Google products to other schools. By directly reaching out to teachers, they were able to bypass senior district officials.

Where's the innovation? It's using voice instead of a keyboard, it is a revolutionary shift in how we use computers. Isn't natural language processing and machine learning just beautiful? Apple had the lead in this market when it introduced Siri in 2011. However, since that time, it seems that it has stopped innovating and improving Siri. At the moment, Apple appears to have allowed Amazon and now Google to overtake it. The sea change is unfolding slowly right now through the sales of speakers that connect to cloud platforms like Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa. Experts, futurists, and venture capitalists are betting big that the next wave of computing is going to be on voice-based cloud platforms. Apple is in danger of losing mindshare among kids, who are the customers of the future and losing the innovation race by falling behind in the next wave of computing, which again is going to be in voice-based cloud platforms. It's anyone's guess and difficult to predict, but time will tell if Apple responds with innovation as they have in the past.