Ben Thompson suggerisce che l’Apple Watch — assieme alle fondamenta poste da iOS 8, con HealthKit e HomeKit — sia parte di una strategia per portare iOS in ogni ambito della nostra vita, e trasformarlo lasciandosi in parte dietro l’iPhone e gli smartphone:

And a new market is exactly where the iPhone is headed: Apple is on the verge of leaving the narrowly-defined smartphone market behind entirely, instead making a play to be involved in every aspect of its consumers’ lives. And, if the importance of an integrated experience matter more with your phone than your PC, because you use it more, how much more important is an integrated experience that touches every detail of your life?

In fact, if there is a flaw in this vision, it’s that even pulling an iPhone from your pocket is too cumbersome. What if you could interact with your home, your car, retail, the cloud, or even your own body with something even more personal and accessible?

Come ricorda Ben, solamente fino a un paio di anni fa la rete era inondata di discussioni su come — e se — iOS sarebbe riuscito a sopravvivere ad Android; Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma) ha sempre sostenuto che i primi prodotti di un’industria nascente — solitamente chiusi e estremamente controllati — vengono con il maturare del settore rimpiazzati da alternative più aperte e integrate. La tesi di Ben Thompson è che Apple abbia costruito un ecosistema aperto secondo certe regole, e stia funzionando:

From  the hardware perspective the iPhone is quite modular. Apple has 785 different suppliers, and while not all of them contribute to the iPhone, the vast majority do, making everything from screws to memory to camera lens assemblies. In fact, while I don’t know how many suppliers are in the Samsung supply chain, I’d wager it’s fewer than the iPhone’s, simply because Samsung itself is a component manufacturer. In other words, from a pure hardware perspective, it is Samsung that is more integrated than Apple. […]

Apple products have many modular components wrapped inside an integrated experience

Secondo Ben Thompson, Google potrebbe aver raggiunto l’apice del proprio successo. Nonostante sia ancora dominante in diversi settori (e lo resterà, come la ricerca), circa il 90% dei suoi profitti vengono tuttora dalla pubblicità che si trova sulle pagine dei risultati del suo motore di ricerca.

Google cattura $45 miliardi di un mercato che ne vale $550, e che sempre più si sta spostando online. La stessa pubblicità online sta cambiando — sia a causa degli smartphone sia a causa dei social network, entrambi settori in cui la posizione “dominante” di Google non è da dare per scontata.

Ne ha scritto Farhad Manjoo:

“The movement of brand advertising into digital will probably not be winner-take-all, like it was in search,” said Ari Paparo, a former advertising product director at Google who is now the chief executive of an ad technology company called Beeswax. “And if it were to be winner-takes-all, it’s much more likely to be Facebook that takes all than it would be Google.”

That spending, on projects like a self-driving car, Google Glass, fiber-optic lines in American cities and even space exploration, generates plenty of buzz for the company.

But the far-out projects remind Mr. Thompson of Microsoft, which has also invested heavily in research and development, and has seen little return on its investments.

“To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear,” he said. “This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”