The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>reliable</i>, which is important because Siri is most useful when it must be <i>most reliable</i>, like when you're in a rush.<p>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.<p>[edit: btw, John Siracusa talks a bit about this on the most recent Hypercritical: <a href="http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/39-quasimodo-backpack</a>]

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.<p>Just like FaceTime and Garageband and iMovie before it, Siri will help Apple to sell more devices.<p>And I didn't even need to write dozens of paragraphs to explain that.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

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<i>?<p></i>Genuine question - wasn't there, myself.

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.<p>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.

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?

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.

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.<p>This is why it is so hard to do hardware <i>and</i> 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.

<i>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.</i><p>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.<p>Glib, but wrong.

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.

"Siri, block all ads."<p>"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

Commoditize your product compliments

One of the author's points is incorrect:<p>-When you use web search on iphone which ad network do you see ads from?<p>You do not buy an iphone to avoid seeing search texts as you still see them