The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model

http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/buy_our_devices_model

by blazamos • 15 years ago

76 69 15 years ago

joebadmo3• 15 years ago

I'm skeptical about Siri. My wife got an iPhone 4S on opening weekend, and we both did the requisite amount of playing with the new feature, and it was amusing, but after the first couple of days she pretty much abandoned it.

There are some reliability problems, but I think the main problem is that Siri still lives firmly in the AI uncanny valley. Which is exacerbated by the way that Apple presents Siri, i.e. as AI.

With a clearly defined set of commands, you can be confident about what's going to work and what isn't. And if you try something that isn't a command, you relegate the failure to "oh, that's not a command." But with Siri, because it's presented as an anthropomorphized, intelligent agent, it makes the failure feel a lot more brittle and frustrating.

For example, "What's my next appointment?" works, but "When's my dentist appointment?" doesn't. Why not? Well, I know why not, and you probably know. It's because it's really, really, really not AI, and unless we make some kind of breakthrough on strong AI, it's not going to be for a long time. But my wife doesn't know that. All she knows is that Siri is cool when it works, but is actually pretty stupid a lot of the time. Which means she's not reliable, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be most reliable, like when you're in a rush.

Apple will certainly continue to add commands and make Siri smarter and smarter, but this will necessarily be incremental, and that failure will always feel brittle to lay users.

[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack]

spiralganglion2• 15 years ago

I can't shake the feeling that the Siri of today is like the app ecosystem of the iPhone 1.

• That Apple has a really solid plan for this feature, and we're only seeing the very beginning of it now — the phase where we are introduced to the interface, before they blow the lid off and open it up to every imaginable use-case.

• That it will be significantly improved before most people ever buy a supporting device, so the handful of customers being burned by the somewhat-lacking version 1 product are vastly outnumbered by the people who get their first taste of the mature, fully-realized vision.

tensor3• 15 years ago

Unlike some of Apple's other features, UI, Apps, and operating software, Siri is not something that will be easy to improve. Siri represents the cumulative efforts of decades of computer science research by numerous public and private entities.

While it's easy to add more voice actions, making advances on the underlying technologies will require additional decades of hard computer science research. Apple, having no R&D division, will not likely even contribute to this.

Unless your main complaint is a lack of canned question types that it can answer, you won't likely see the fast improvements you are expecting in the next few years.

telcodud• 15 years ago

I'm not sure it's a valid comparison.

Apple sold more iPhone4s than all previous iPhones combined. I expect that iPhone4S will sell even more. Releasing Siri as a beta to such a large customer base is not the same as releasing the "somewhat-lacking version 1" iPhone, and then iterating it forward.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

In 5 years it might add to something, but I don't think people should be buying iPhone 4S because of it right now, when they're probably only going to use it in the first week.

Tichy3• 15 years ago

I really don't get this notion of a lot of Apple supporters that just because they put something out and call it AI, Apple has now solidly invented AI. Weren't they usually praised for not announcing things before they are ready? According to your theory, with Siri they would have broken the rule. The current Siri would merely be an announcement that one day they would deliver real AI, and in the meantime they would deliver the current broken version.

ajryan2• 15 years ago

What about the feasiblity of using voice commands in a public environent, e.g. at work or on a train? I'm interested in hearing how people deal with that.

joebadmo3• 15 years ago

That's definitely another issue too. My wife has specifically said that she doesn't like to do that, even in semi-private (e.g. work), because she doesn't necessarily want to say stuff about her private schedule out loud, or broadcast her next text message, or even who she's calling.

danssig2• 15 years ago

They thought of that. You can put it up to your head like you're on a phone call. You don't feel self-conscious talking on the phone in public do you?

algoshift• 15 years ago

IBM: Watson.

Now, if Apple could buy IBM...

swlkr• 15 years ago

Whens my next dentist appointment works for me for some reason, but I agree when Siri fails, she fails spectacularly and it's jarring.

acchow2• 15 years ago

With enough commands in its library, Siri will not only be indistinguishable from real AI, it will be intelligent (please see also the behaviorist view of AI, Descartes' language test and the Turing Test).

randallsquared• 15 years ago

Aside from the fact that this has been tried and not yet worked (see Lenat's Cyc, for example), having to use the Turing Test as a measure of sapience is an artifact of having no idea what sapience is. If we knew (or, once we know) what algorithm produces consciousness, we can test for that directly, and it seems unlikely to me that a giant lookup table will have an internal experience of consciousness in the way that I do.

spiralganglion2• 15 years ago

What's going to stop Google from creating an "open" alternative to Siri? Siri is just a technology, not a business model. Google is really good at recreating competitor technologies around their own ad-driven model.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, either. I use an Android phone, but only because the iPhone isn't offered on my carrier of choice. I love Apple. But I don't see how Siri ("Finally") gives them occasion to undermine Google.

icebraining• 15 years ago

Nothing stops Google from creating an alternative, but that won't be available on iOS, which for now is a source of Google searches.

tensor3• 15 years ago

Considering Siri is the commercialization of a lot of public research, it wouldn't be that hard for a company like Google to extend their existing voice actions technology using the exact same body of research. They might even be able to license much of the exact same technology as Apple did when they bought Siri the company.

My complaint with the quotes and blog post is somewhat different. They both seem to claim Siri will revolutionize search. But Siri isn't about search at all, it's about taking spoken words and turning them into an appropriate text based search query. It still relies on databases and search engines to do the actual searching. At most, it can add a bit of extra context to the query that you might not be able to infer from the text alone. It also represents a unified interface to several domain specific databases. If anything, Siri is a complementing interface to existing search technologies. Buying a bunch of databases won't let Apple solve the problem of search.

delinka• 15 years ago

If I'm taling to my phone, I'm not looking at the screen for ads. So how does Google bring ads to voice-recog? Is the voice reply interrupted by voice ads? I wouldn't use it.

alexhaefner• 15 years ago

Apple launches new hardware with new software features. ALWAYS. Siri is the, "What if I could just talk to my device, and it would be able to disambiguate and give me exactly what information I wanted." Okay, Siri explained.

Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.

And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.

contextfree• 15 years ago

The article he links to is a really fine specimen of inane tech punditry. Why are tech execs downplaying a feature of a competing product? Uh, gee I dunno, because it's a feature of a competing product maybe? Is there really nothing better to write an article about?

shareme• 15 years ago

One of the author's points is incorrect:

-When you use web search on iphone which ad network do you see ads from?

You do not buy an iphone to avoid seeing search texts as you still see them

andrewljohnson• 15 years ago

Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free. It’s a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device buyers.

BS, iCloud has paid upgrades, and I imagine those paid upgrades make the rest of the model break even or better, just like DropBox. It's not ad-model vs. devices-model, it's freemium product tacked onto device sales, further enhancing margins.

Glib, but wrong.

irons• 15 years ago

The statement you're quibbling with — "free-of-charge online services ad-free" — is unassailable. Anyone signing up for iCloud with the intention of using it for data sync (contacts, calendars, browser bookmarks), and/or application data, and/or the ability to track, lock, and wipe lost devices, will be hard-pressed to exceed the free 5GB.

Sure, iTunes Match or syncing several devices directly to iCloud might induce a heavy user to pay for more, but iCloud remains a bona-fide free service for the vast majority of its customers.

wvenable2• 15 years ago

It's really a stretch to believe that Siri is how Apple is going to compete with Google and Microsoft on search -- Apple doesn't do search! Siri calls out to existing search services from Google and Wolfram Alpha to do the actual work.

Apple isn't good at services; iCloud may be the most satisfactory result after a long list of so-so and downright terrible attempts. There's no technology here that either Google or Microsoft couldn't do better.

Steko• 15 years ago

"Apple doesn't do search!"

They really didn't do AI until a few weeks ago either. And they didn't do music until they did music. Would you really be shocked if one of the headlines tomorrow morning was that Duck Duck Go was acquired by Apple?

wvenable2• 15 years ago

If they bought Duck Duck Go, that would be something. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about Siri. A product with a relatively small scope that the punditry is blowing out of proportion. This is the very same media that insisted we'd see an iPhone 5. There's no substance here -- it's all baseless wishful thinking.

gujk5• 15 years ago

If DDG went mainstream it would probably hit the paid tier for the Google API that generates most of its quality content.

minikomi• 15 years ago

How about storing the most common successful searches by the user base for certain phrases, then skipping the search path once over a certain threshold?

for_shame• 15 years ago

I don't know if this is unambiguously a step forward from license sales or tacky ads... It could be just me, but don't "The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model" and "just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them" sound a lot like the way computer manufacturers competed with one another in Elder Days?

Genuine question - wasn't there, myself.

5teev• 15 years ago

Except a lot of the time, it wasn't a lot of cool shit, it was a bunch of crapware and you still had to buy software to actually do cool stuff.

metafour• 15 years ago

I don't have a 4S because I'm on the other upgrade cycle. i.e. I got the 4 at launch. After the initial "cool" factor I think Siri makes sense in certain situations, like when driving. I would love to have access to my iPhone by speaking to it while driving.

zarify• 15 years ago

I was going to stick with my 4 for another year but ended up with a 4S through a rather circuitous route.

Anyhow, since if you have a 4S you're going to play with Siri, I've found that it's really quite useful even when not in a hands-free situation like driving. I've found it very useful for setting reminders faster than I would be able to manually, which I found quite surprising. I'm looking forward to finding more things like that in the future.

YooLi• 15 years ago

Here's what I have found works faster with Siri:

Remind me to... (like you said) Wake me up at/in... Call [name in my contacts] Call [place not in my contacts]. Siri looks up business for you. Note [something I want to make a note of]

CoffeeDregs• 15 years ago

Siri is a nice technology (though, after having seen 3 attempted uses, I have yet to see it work), but the sell-hardware-backed-by-nice-software/services is not some revolutionary business model; further, often, it's not one that is sustainable for long. The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales; now they are distributed across hardware sales as a per-unit transfer cost and become a cost-center; now investors and organizational politics begin to pay attention and the model of buy-random-shit-and-claim-it-is-accretive begins to sour.

This is why it is so hard to do hardware and software together. There are few examples of long term success in hardware/software and Apple is certainly not one of them (except in the '00s). IBM is one. But, if one area of the business takes off, the pressure to drop the other is immense (see Thinkpad and HP's current flail-ures). As XCode users will recall, there are also issues with adding significant value to past purchasers: if you paid $100 for a product that had $20 of awesome value added later by an upgrade, the company who took your $100 of cash should only be able to recognize $80 of revenue now.

rflrob• 15 years ago

> The problem is that as the non-hardware costs start to become material, the pressure mounts to show that they are actually related to hardware sales

I think that implicit in Gruber's argument is the idea that just buying Apple's devices isn't radically more expensive than the competitors. I've heard this attributed to Tim Cook, that lots of Apple devices are now roughly price-equivalent with other brands, but with so many other features.

gujk5• 15 years ago

For a company with no plans to float new debt or investment, and a CEO who plans to stay in his job for a decade, short term accounting games have no effect on company performance.

alkimie• 15 years ago

I's suggest that Siri really is something new under the sun: it is the first large-scale, distributed AI system interacting with the 'real world' in an uncontrolled manner. It would not surprise me if somewhere in the back end queries are being looked at and humans are fine-tuning or making suggestions of possible responses. There is a scale here that's never been seen before. And Apple can afford a legion of unseen human beings helping in the background if it wants to experiment with this.

10101010• 15 years ago

"Siri, block all ads."

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

freejack2• 15 years ago

I think much of the commentary misses the fact that Siri is not a feature, its a UI, and a very early-stage one at that. Criticizing Siri as less than useful in its current iteration is like criticizing WIMP as less than useful 20 years ago.

The fact that Siri is UI and not a feature is exactly why Microsoft and Google and many other service providers should worry about it - it commoditizes the back-end and creates a new interaction point around which Apple, and currently only Apple, is creating business value. Both Microsoft and Google have technology cards to play in this area, but neither has deployed a new user-interface in the way that Apple recently has. I would expect them to each go after a solid play in this area, in the same way that Microsoft responded to the Wii with Kinect - with a strong competitive urgency. Whether or not they are successful in their response is something we'll know in time.

Tichy3• 15 years ago

How is it an UI? I mean it is voice input. OK, that's an UI, but it is an UI that has been around for thousands of years. Non-Apple phones also had voice input for years. Now Siri adds some things it recognizes, like calendar dates. What is so revolutionary about it? Other vendors will also add more tasks to their voice recognition. Google is arguably in a better position to do so, because they have worked on the problem for years (not voice recognition, but what do users mean when they search for "x").

freejack2• 15 years ago

I never said revolutionary, you did. Had you asked, I would have probably characterized it as "evolutionary" more than anything - but most innovation is.

I disagree that this is imply "voice input". Siri takes a step beyond simple data input and manipulation and provides a new interface to several system functions and services in a cohesive and purposeful fashion.

If, as you contend, that Google is well positioned to respond to Siri, then they probably will - I'm not sure you actually read my original comment - I had pretty clearly indicated that both Microsoft and Google have assets that they can deploy in response to Siri.

krschultz• 15 years ago

Commoditize your product compliments

The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model

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