Apple's organisational disadvantage in the age of AI

A useful way to understand the successes—and the stagnation—of big tech is through the lens of organisational advantage. Not just what a company did, but how it was set up to win.

Take Microsoft. As Ben Thompson at Stratechery has argued, everything that made Microsoft dominant in the PC era—licensing, partner-first, enterprise-focused—was the very thing that kneecapped its attempts at mobile. The organisational strengths became strategic liabilities.

Now consider Apple. Its superpower has always been usability. A seamless, intuitive experience that made even complex technology accessible to non-experts. Design was product. UX was strategy.

But AI is hostile to that principle. The current wave of generative AI is probabilistic, messy, inconsistent. The experience can't be wholly predicted or locked down. To get value from AI today, users need nouse—to be savvy, adaptive, exploratory. The very opposite of what Apple optimised for.

So while others are experimenting, launching, failing forward—Apple is stuck. Because their cultural strength has become a constraint. A usability-first company can't easily ship a technology that's fundamentally unusable in the traditional sense.

And maybe that's fine. But it explains why Apple feels absent from the AI moment.