CES Day 0 – Planes, yachts & Digital assistants

Autonomous hype becomes more realistic.

Planes, yachts & automobiles.

• CES 2019 is even more about vehicles than it ever has been before but to the industry’s credit, there is more reality and less hype than last year.
• The best example of this is to be found in autonomous driving where numerous players have reigned in their expectations stating that they hope to have commercial vehicles on the road within 10 years.
• Toyota, Valeo, Bosch and even Byton are much more sanguine regarding the timeline which matches with the difficulties that industry leader Waymo experienced towards the end of last year (see here).
• This fits in well with RFM’s expectations that autonomous vehicles will not become a commercial reality much before 2028.
• Outside of this resetting of expectations, there are very few announcements, being made that will drive the digitisation of the vehicle forward, meaning that 2019 is going to be about trying to deliver.
• Even Byton which is without a doubt one of the most forward-thinking companies in the industry did little more than say: “here is the concept from 2018 and here is the production vehicle and we didn’t change much”.
• Another member of the industry is so short of ideas that it has decided to almost completely fill its booth with a huge yacht while another has again rolled out the one-seater drone (helicopter) that has been spotted for the last year or two at CES but nowhere else.
• How a yacht qualifies as consumer electronics is not clear nor is how one earns a return on the millions of dollars that it probably cost to put the yacht there.
• The good news is that there are signs that the automotive industry is waking up to the problems that it has in competing with the smartphone and is slowly moving to address them.
• This is a new development as the response to this in the past has typically been: “yes we know but we can’t do anything about it”.
• My hopes have risen somewhat from rock bottom.

Digital Assistants: The numbers game

• CES 2019 has kicked off with a war of words between Google and Amazon with regard to who is more relevant based on the number of active users that they have.
• Google expects to have 1bn installs of Google Assistant up 100% over the last 7 months whereas Amazon says that it has sold 100m Alexa enabled devices.
• These are not comparative figures as the Amazon devices will all be in use whereas one can not say the same for Google Assistant.
• Using the usual math for MaUs vs installs would lead me to estimate that Google Assistant MaUs are probably around 400-500m which is 4-5x that of Amazon.
• Not to be outdone, Chinese AI-leader Baidu has announced that its digital assistant, Duer OS is present on 200m devices but how many are being actively used is unclear as this figure was 35m last November when installs were at 150m.
• I would estimate around 50m.
• The fact that Baidu is miles adrift of both Amazon and Google is irrelevant, as it really only functions in Chinese where Google and Amazon are completely absent.
• If one takes smartphones out of the equation, it is still about 75% Amazon Echo and 25% Google Assistant meaning that Google has made up very little ground in the last 9 months.
• This is disappointing as it is a much better product than Alexa meaning that it should win out in the end.
• However, almost everyone is still only using these devices to set timers, turn lights on and off and listen to music.
• Hence, Google’s advantages are mostly lost on the ignorant consumer, giving an advantage to Amazon and its mighty retail empire.
• I still think that Google can beat Amazon, but something needs to change to allow Google to start closing the gap once again.