It has troubled me in recent months that for all of Apple's promise, for all of its prominence in people's lives, that it may have a structural weakness that Google will eventually exploit to its advantage. Simply put, I have wondered if Apple's beautifully integrated ecosystem is short on informational oxygen.
How can Apple really compete against Google that knows everything we want to know (because we ask it) and everything we know (because it tells it to us)? When it comes to the kind of emergent artificial intelligence promised by Siri, isn't Apple doomed by not knowing what Google knows about us?
Maybe not.
I could be wrong about this (as I have possibly been wrong about Google's advantage), but it is possible that the most important aspect of the iOS 6 software released yesterday is its integration with Facebook. But look at Facebook's share price, you say. Surely it is on the decline as well?
Not so fast.
Apple's iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 are now seamlessly integrated with both Twitter and Facebook. That means that not only can you tweet or post updates from within native Apple applications, but friends lists go into your contacts and events go on your calendar. And Siri knows it all. This is the kind of stuff that Google Now is supposed to excel at.
There's another way to look at the quantity of information in emergent systems. As Lars Hard, CTO and founder of artificial intelligence app platform Expertmaker told me in a recent interview (soon to be published here), often, "the problem is that dimensionality is so high… we learn that complexity reduction is really central."
Looking at these two things together, Apple's embrace of social data and the notion of beneficial "dimensionality reduction" in complex systems, led me to a different thought. What if social information is more predictive of behavior than search information? And since social information tends to follow power law distribution, could it be that a user's Facebook data is exponentially more valuable (from a predictive point of view) than simple search query data, and by extension multiple networks (i.e., Facebook and Twitter) multiply that value again?
So while Google may have an advantage in terms of raw data, could it be that the social data that Apple will collect is more relevant data? Could a lot of what we do on the web be noise? Could who we are on the web, our social attributes, correlate more with what we need our iPhones to do for us? And, of course, if Siri becomes more reliable, won't users, over time, route more of their search queries through it (her?), further eroding Google's initial edge?
If I am right here, it will mean that Google's decision to stake it's claim on Google+ was a fateful (and bad) bet. Whatever its virtues, it suffers from the non-first-mover dis-advantage. As an OS, Windows Phone suffers from a similar fate. Had either of these things come out first (or even second) in their respective fields they might have dominated. But Apple has bet on the winners in the current social scene (and I suspect it may buy Twitter outright at some point) and that bet seems to be a good one.
I am, just now, as I write this, downloading iOS 6 to my iPhone, so from a use perspective this is pure conjecture. But that is how it is with technology. It is a work in progress and we are continually getting (and losing) our bearings in the rapidly changing landscape. This time, at least, I will have 3D buildings and turn-by-turn directions to guide me!
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