Apple and Telegram: Victims of Their Strategic Hubris
July 9, 2025
No smart software to write this essay. This dinobaby is somewhat old fashioned.
What’s “strategic hubris”? I use this bound phrase to signal that an organization manifests decisions that combine big thinking with a destructive character flow. Strategy is the word I use to capture the most important ideas to get an organization to generate revenue and win in its business and political battles. Now hubris. A culture of superiority may be the weird instinct of a founder; it may be marketing jingo that people start believing; or it is jargon learned in school. When the two come together, some organizations can make expensive, often laughable, mistakes. Examples range from Windows and its mobile phone to the Ford Edsel.
I read “Apple Reaches Out to OpenAI, Anthropic to Build Out Siri technology.” In my opinion, this illustrates strategic hubris operating on two pivot points like a merry-go-round: Up and down; round and round.
The cited article states:
… over the past year or so it [Apple] has faced a variety of leadership and technological challenges developing Apple Intelligence, which is based on in-house foundation models. The more personalized Siri technology with more personalized AI-driven features is now due in 2026, according to a statement by Apple …
This “failure” is a result of strategic hubris. Apple’s leadership believed it could handle smart software. The company taught China how to be a manufacturing super power could learn and do AI. Apple’s leadership seems to have followed the marketing rule: Fire, Aim, Ready. Apple announced AI or Apple Intelligence and then failed to deliver. Then Apple reorganized and it failed again. Now Apple is looking at third party firms to provide the “intelligence” for Apple.
Personally I think smart software is good at some things and terrible at others. Nevertheless, a failure to provide or “do” smart software is the digital equivalent of having a teacher put a dunce cap on a kid’s head and making him sit in the back of the classroom. In the last 18 months, Apple has been playing fast and loose with court decisions, playing nice with China, and writing checks for assorted fines levied by courts. But the premier action has been the firm’s failure in the alleged “next big thing”.
Let me shift from Apple because there is a firm in the same boat as the king of Cupertino. Telegram has no smart software. Nikolai Durov is, according to Pavel (the task master) working on AI. However, like Apple, Telegram has been chatting up (allegedly) Elon Musk. The Grok AI system, some rumors have it, would / could / should be integrated into the Telegram platform. Telegram has the same strategic hubris I associated with Apple. (These are not the only two firms afflicted with this digital SARS variant.)
I want to identify several messages I extracted from the Apple and Telegram AI anecdotes:
- Both companies were doing other things when the smart software yachts left the docks in Half Moon Bay
- Both companies have the job of integrating another firm’s smart software into large, fast-moving companies with many moving parts, legal problems, and engineers who are definitely into “strategic hubris”
- Both companies have to deliver AI that does not alienate existing users and attract new customers at the same time.
Will these firms be able to deliver a good enough AI solution? Probably. However, both may be vulnerable to third parties who hop on a merry-go-round. There is a predictable and actually no-so-smart pony named Apple and one named Messenger. The threat is that Apple and Telegram have been transmogrified into little wooden ponies. The smart people just ride them until the time is right to jump off.
That’s one scenario for companies with strategic hubris who missed the AI yachts when they were under construction and who were not on the expensive machines when they cast off. Can the costs of strategic hubris be recovered? The stakeholders hope so.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2025
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