Must-Read: Marco Arment: Avoiding Blackberry’s Fate

Must-Read: Marco Arment: Avoiding BlackBerry’s Fate: “Before the iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry was the king of smartphones…

…When the iPhone came out, the BlackBerry continued to do well for a little while. But the iPhone had completely changed the game…. The BlackBerry’s success came to an end not because RIM started releasing worse smartphones, but because the new job of the smartphone shifted almost entirely outside of their capabilities, and it was too late to catch up…. No new initiative, management change, or acquisition in 2007 could’ve saved the BlackBerry. It was too late, and the gulf was too wide.

Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces…. If they’re right — and that’s a big ‘if’ — I’m worried for Apple…. [in] big-data services and AI…. Apple can do rudimentary versions of all of those, but their competitors — again, especially Google — are far ahead of them, and the gap is only widening. And Apple is showing worryingly few signs of meaningful improvement or investment in these areas….

If Google is wrong, and computing continues to be defined by a tightly controlled grid of siloed apps that you poke a thousand times a day on a smooth rectangle of manufacturing excellence, Apple is fine…. But if Google is right, that’s a big problem for Apple.