The Demise of Apple

Future historians will look back at Apple, point to a specific moment, and say "Here, at this point, is when Apple started its decline. This event started Apple's fall.". That point will be the construction of their new spaceship-inspired headquarters.

Why do I blame their new building? I don't, actually. I think others -- those future historians -- will. They will get the time correct, but point to the wrong event.

First things first. What do I have against Apple's shiny new headquarters?

It's round.

Apple's new building is large, elegant, expensive, and ... the wrong shape. It is a giant circle, or wheel, or doughnut, and it works poorly with human psychology and perception. The human mind works better with a grid than a circle.

Not that humans can't handle circular objects. We can, when they are small or distant. We have no problem with the moon being round, for example. We're okay with clocks and watches, and old-style speedometers in cars.

We're good when we are looking at the entire circle. Watches and clocks are smaller than us, so we can view the entire circle and process it. (Clocks in towers, such as the "Big Ben" clock in London or the center of town, are also okay, since we view them from a distance and they appear small.)

The problems occur when we are inside the circle, when we are navigating along the circumference. We're not good at keeping track of gradual changes in direction. (Possibly why so many people get lost in the desert. They travel in a circle without realizing it.)

Apple's building looks nice, from above. I suspect the experience of working inside the building will be one of modest confusion and discomfort. Possibly at such a minor level that people do not realize that something is wrong. But this discomfort will be significant, and eventually people will rebel.

It's ironic that Apple, the company that designs and builds products with the emphasis on "easy to use", got the design of their building wrong.

So it may be that historians, looking at Apple's (future) history, blame the design of the new headquarters for Apple's (future) failures. They will (rightly) associate the low-level confusion and additional brain processing required for navigation of such a building as draining Apple's creativity and effectiveness.

I think that they (the historians) will be wrong.

The building is a problem, no doubt. But it won't cause Apple's demise. The true cause will be overlooked.

That true cause? It is Apple's fixation on computing devices.

Apple builds (and sells) computers. They are the sole company that has survived from the 1970s microcomputer age. (Radio Shack, Commodore, Cromemco, Sol, Northstar, and the others left the market decades ago.) In that age, microcomputers were stand-alone devices -- there was no internet, no ethernet, no communication aside from floppy disks and a few on-line bulletin board systems (BBS) that required acoustic coupler modems. Microcomputers were "centers of computing" and they had to do everything.

Today, computing is changing. The combination of fast and reliable networks, cheap servers, and easy virtual machines allows the construction of cloud computing, where processing is split across multiple processors. Google is taking advantage of this with its Chromebooks, which are low-end laptops that run a browser and little else. The "real" processing is performed not on the Chromebook but on web servers, often hosted in the cloud. (I'm typing this essay on a Chromebook.)

All of the major companies are moving to cloud technology. Google, obviously, with Chromebooks and App Engine and Android devices. Microsoft has its Azure services and versions of Word and Excel that run entirely in the cloud, and they are working on a low-end laptop that runs a browser and little else. It's called the "Cloudbook" -- at least for now.

Amazon.com has its cloud services and its Kindle and Fire tablets. IBM, Oracle, Dell, HP, and others are moving tasks to the cloud.

Except Apple. Apple has no equivalent of the Chromebook, and I don't think it can provide one. Apple's business model is to sell hardware at a premium, providing a superior user experience to justify that premium. The superior user experience is possible with local processing and excellent integration of hardware and software. Apps run on the Macs, MacBooks, and iPhones. They don't run on servers.

A browser-only Apple laptop (a "Safaribook"?) would offer little value. The Apple experience does not translate to web sites.

When Apple does use cloud technology, they use it as an accessory to the PC. The processing for Siri is done in a a big datacenter, but its all for Siri and the user experience. Apple's iCloud lets users store data and synchronize it across devices, but it is simply a big, shared disk. Siri and iCloud make the PC a better PC, but don't transform the PC.

This is the problem that Apple faces. It is stuck in the 1970s, when individual computers did everything. Apple has made the experience pleasant, but it has not changed the paradigm.

Computing is changing. Apple is not. That is what will cause Apple's downfall.