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It’s a feature, not a product.
Reportedly, this is what Steve Jobs said to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston in 2009. The context was Apple was intrested in acquiring Dropbox. The Dropbox team insisted they had a viable product, but Jobs thought that file syncing was just a feature of a larger ecosystem.
Turns out, they were both right.
Dropbox is a very successful product (a $4 billion company, far larger than the “nine figures” offered by Apple), but it is also true that file syncing is a commodity feature. Dropbox was very innovative and took the tech world by storm in its early days. But today, every company has a similar service. The pool of file syncing services is large, with Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and others all swimming along.
I think artificial intelligence will follow the same path. AI is the new shiny these days, but it’s really all based on open-source libraries and publicly published research. OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and all the others approach this the same way. In a year or two, these so-called “chat-bot assistants” will be a commodity. The big three (Apple, Google, Microsoft) will have either created or purchased viable AI bots to incorporate into their operating systems, and the rest will fade away.
AI is a feature, not a product.
Sure, there will still be room for the Dropboxes of AI. Standalone applications that integrate where they can with OS features while offering better/faster/more robust services within their own platforms. But most people will just use the thing that comes on their device.
