"I once had a dream": What Apple.Co should do with its small fortune

    If you had $160 billion, what would you do with it?  Go wild?  Pretend to be God?  Go on a spending spree?  This is Apple company's current existential dilemma, akin perhaps to the "first world problems feed" on Reddit that you see now and then.  To put Apple's piggybank in perspective, this sum is greater than the 2013 GDP of 71% of all the nations in the world; 138 nations to be exact.  This is no chump change we are talking about.

    There was a recent discussion of the issue on some websites, suggesting that Apple (as Google) go into telecommunications.  Perhaps given the enormous problems in the field, they might.  But this is generally an bad idea. The robustness of the computing industry has been based precisely on the fact that it has remained a 'fractured' marketplace, with each actor competing against a hundred others in its own domain; domains usually did not intermix. This rampant competition is what led to innovation and growth in the industry, and its current success.  If titans began consuming their children (or their parents, depending on how you look at it), be sure to expect the growth in this industrial sector to grind down to a halt.

    What then, should Apple Co. do?  Here are my two cents.

    People forget that there are still many basic unresolved issues in computing, as practical instruments.  Yes, there have been enormous changes in the field, which made prior problems look now like trivial matters. I still remember how my old computer's operating system constantly crashed in  closed feedback loops.  As a matter of fact, todays solutions are so taken for granted, that it is somewhat sad to see today's generation with so little awareness of what these problems had been: the unreliability of hard drives, the general problem of storage, etc.  The millennial generation seems to assume that things will exist forever 'in the cloud', when in fact their solidity and reliability still has been far from won.

    Apple, in my opinion, should basically stick to what it has done best: improving all of those areas in computing which remain highly problematic, and which will likely require the vast amount of sums available for their solution.  Here are a few of them.

    Storage devices are still unreliable, be they hard drives, network attached storage, servers, etc.  They are current based mainly on magnetic storage (hard drives), whose information inevitably wears out over time due to its magnetic character, or become corrupted on sudden and extended power outages.  There have been important improvements, certainly. New file systems as ZFS and Btrfs which do much to keep the information intact, but they are (in principle) still primitive. Like asking a maid to constantly be cleaning one's house as one goes about one's daily business, they are costly of time, electricity (energy) and computing resources.  These systems are nice if you are a control freak, but if one were able to prevent the problem from originating in the first place, there would be no need to 'clean up'.  

    Storage systems should, in principle: 1) suffer no corruption under any circumstances, 2) last at least 1 lifetime, say 100 years 3) require next to no power when not being used.  If you could somehow combine the M-Disc with regular hard drives, this would certainly be a huge improvement. There should be the capacity to write onto discs permanently, while at the same time maintaining flexible spaces of eternal change.

    A general lesson is this.  If you look at Apple's corporate history, it is important to remember that it emerged basically by seeking idealized solutions for the existing state of affairs.  Seeking these solutions meant resolving complex problems, but in the end everyone was the better for it.  (Just because you know where you want to go does not (obviously) necessarily mean you are there; you have to undertake the long and uncertain journey in the first place.)  

    This is perhaps akin to the industrial research labs at Xerox Park, from which Steve Jobs and others (Bill Gates) 'stole' so many good and interesting ideas. (Jobs once commented that he was so flabbergasted by the graphical user interface, that he saw none of the other things shown to him, as interconnected ethernet.)  Apple should take a clue from Xerox Parc, and begin paving the way to the future in computing, in such a way that will truly blow everyone's minds out of the water: something that will lead to such a robust computing experience, that it will make contemporary usage appear primitive and utterly outmoded.

    Those are the kinds of things Apple should be aiming for.  They should, in the end, keep that magic, which Steve Jobs was so well known for,  alive and thriving.  Doing anything else would simply be a distraction, and a tragedy to Jobs' legacy.