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This top venture capitalist thinks Apple is missing the mark

This top venture capitalist thinks Apple is missing the mark

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson said Tuesday he's not rooting against Apple (AAPL), but he believes the tech giant isn't focused on what's driving the future of technology.

The founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures told CNBC's " Squawk Box " he believes the biggest opportunities are in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Apple hasn't invested as heavily as Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL) in those areas, he added.

"The future of technology is more and more in the cloud. It's more and more in machine learning and AI. It's not really in the devices," Wilson said. "[Apple] is very much a hardware company and a systems software company."

Wilson, who predicted in 2014 that Apple would not be a top three tech company by 2020, also said he's been impressed by the wayMicrosoft (MSFT) has turned its business around, putting the cloud and AI at its core.

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Apple stock logged its eighth-consecutive decline on Monday, its longest losing streak in nearly 18 years. And on Monday night, CEO Tim Cook, appearing on CNBC, was trying to reassure investors after its first-ever quarterly drop in iPhone sales.

Last week, Apple delivered fiscal second-quarter earnings and revenue that fell short of estimates.

One way that Apple could take advantage of outside innovation could be through acquisitions, said Jason Calacanis, investor and founder of start-ups such as Inside.com. While competitors like Google and Facebook (FB) have been "fearless" on mergers and acquisitions, Apple has been "a victim of how brilliant they are," Calacanis told CNBC's " Squawk Alley ."

"They think that they're better at building things than anybody else. Which is true, but you can only build so many things," Calacanis said.

"The smartest people in the world are not only at Apple," he said.

Despite Apple's "phenomenal" performance, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig said that customers in emerging markets like India might not be as quick as American consumers to pay a premium for iPhones. As long as Apple's software is taken for granted, iOS innovations lack financial differentiation, Rosensweig said.

"I pay for the Apple services and they are very good," Rosensweig told CNBC's " Squawk on the Street ." "But you don't pay for it because you want it. You pay for it because they don't give you enough storage."

Former Apple CEO John Sculley said that Apple could shift away from hardware to take advantage of smart messaging, or bots, and improve upon it, like it has done with MP3 players in the past. Still, that pivot might not be clear yet to technology industry watchers.

"It was unfortunate for Apple that Mark Zuckerberg came out with a very clear, exciting vision for Facebook at F8," Sculley told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "Apple is stealth. It never talks about it."

— CNBC's Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.



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