Apple is struggling to lure the brightest and the most smart phone tech savvy people to work for them causing the company to lag behind other phone producers in creating innovative smartphone services. Experts say ironically it’s the company’s self imposed end-user privacy policies that are to blame.
The experts say that based on what they hear from industry insiders and high tech recruitment consultants. Apple at present does not have the pull to attract the very small number of data scientists in the marketplace to not only leverage and develop cloud-based services but also think ahead to what smartphone users may want.
They say Apple’s difficulty in matching companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon for the best data science and analytical minds, falls at the door of the company’s desire to protect its users privacy. They cite as an example Apple’s policies on data retention gathered by its Siri ‘personal assistant’ product being six months, compared to the only 15 minutes for information kept from user’s use of Apple Maps.
The experts say if all apple’s devices had the short information retention time of its Apple Maps and those of rival Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant, and the Google Now service provided by Google it would help attract “data-hungry analysts and scientists, that thrive on ready and almost immediate access to data.
Although Apple was not currently able to compete in the employment stakes for the most smartphone tech savvy potential employees, Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor and the University of Washington, thinks this will only be a short lived obstacle for the company.
“In the past, Apple has not been at the vanguard of machine learning and cutting edge artificial intelligence work, but that is rapidly changing. They are after the best and the brightest, just like everybody else.”
Stay Connected
