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I suppose for both Google and Apple 'dropping the ball' not only relates to starting late, but also a) having the ingredients way before Amazon b) knowing the market for such a product was viable(people were ready) and desirable($$ could be huge) c) and having made failed attempts at it Apple and Google both tried to attack it through the SmartTV effort, which came and went and didn't amount to much. People didn't want to spend upwards of $1K for such a thing, whoops. Then Google purchased Nest, thinking that would be a nice backdoor into the Home automated system -- I have a Nest also, good product, but again, not the right entry way for this product category. Than along comes Amazon and creates essentially a wireless smart speaker, that you can talk to, at a $100 price tag. Boom. Don't get me wrong, Google Home is catching up fast and I had a heavy debate/research session when we got Alexa on whether I should exchange it for Home. But in the end, it just didn't matter, Alexa did things well enough at this point. Google may have the better, more widely adopted ecosystem (Gmail, Calendar, etc), the Voice assistant is likely better from what I've read, and I have no doubt Google can do the SDK/app ecosystem in a great way. But really, I feel like Alexa is doing things just well enough to keep the competition at bay, and with their head start, they're owning the consumer mindshare. And the combination of those 2 things might be enough to fend off any newcomers now.... though let the competition and innovation continue -- on that I agree! |