How to measure helping others
Apple isn’t measured by revenue or profit, at least not primarily. The measure is always satisfied customers. The application of services, software and computing hardware to improve lives has always been the modus vivendi and the resulting customer creation has always been the metric of success. Revenues and profits follow customer creation in a 1:1 relationship.
WWDC seems to attract attention as a catharsis for product and strategy announcements but it was never intended to be this. It’s about developers (the D in WWDC) and what matters to them: APIs, operating system updates, languages, SDK, and other tooling. It’s also a chance to reveal the economic value proposition for those developers who are following their part of the $2 trillion ecosystem.
And so the measure of WWDC should be how developers are created and satisfied. The products, which come later, are important but what matters more is developer opportunity, productivity and satisfaction.
So here is what I’m looking forward to:
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- New developer opportunity with AI. This is via easier integrations, more choices perhaps in terms of back ends and possible hooks into different parts of the ecosystem. To wit: Swift extensions, *Kit extensions with hooks to smart home, exercise/fitness, accessibility.
- New developer productivity tools: How is AI going to improve the toolchain for developers.
- New developer business models: how agents can be built and integrated into privacy and safety that only Apple can guarantee.
As Apple has shown with accessibility improvements (foreshadowing!), AI can be used to make people’s lives better especially those who cannot perform due to disability. AI can lift those “below the median” in terms of many forms of ability: below median communications, below median health and below median mobility. Those with more limited ability can be “enhanced” into at least median ability. By definition, half of humans are below the median so helping them is as useful as helping those above the median.
This is in contrast to the narrative that AI makes supermen. The opportunity is not mainly about taking over high ability tasks and forcing human effort to be displaced. it’s much more about making the less able become more abled. (Characteristic of GenAI output is the “averageness” of it. For those of exceptional ability it feels worse/erroneous and irritates. For those of less ability it’s empowering. AI pushes toward the median, both from below and above.)
Below the median here does not necessarily mean below the median income or wealth. Ability is not always correlated with income. There are many Apple customers and potential Apple customers who can use help. I surely can use help in many areas of life.
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WWDC is about the scaffolding upon which these grand problems can be solved. Scaffolding is not pretty to look at and most look away in disappointment if that’s all that is revealed. But no matter how well regarded, no great building has ever been built without scaffolding.