Google vs. Amazon – Homefront.

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This could be a repeat of VHS vs. Betamax. 

• Google is adding functionality to allow Google Assistant to compete more directly with Amazon’s Alexa, but what it really needs is to offer love and support to developers of smart home products.
• Google’s failure to do this was visible on every stand at CES where a smart home product was to be found as they all will work with Amazon Alexa
• Only a very tiny fraction will work with Google Assistant.
• Google’s shopping functionality has involved singing a up a series of retailers such as Costco, PetSmart and Target to link their online ordering systems with Google Home such that a similar (to Amazon) shopping experience can be offered through the device.
• Measuring up to Amazon in this category is going to be tough because Amazon has one system through which millions of products are available globally, whereas Google will have to sign up lots of retailers in every locality where it aims to have this service available.
• However, when it comes to almost all of the other features, Google Assistant is capable of offering a vastly superior user performance than Amazon Alexa.
• This is because the AI that powers Google Assistant is top of the class while Alexa’s is second rate at best.
• Furthermore, the Google Home speaker is $50 cheaper than the Amazon Echo and in my opinion, a nicer looking product.
• However, where Google falls over is home automation and here Amazon is currently ruling the roost.
• RFM research has found that device developers receive plenty of love and support from Amazon which combined with the fact that there are now 8m devices in the hands of users drives them to make their products work with Alexa right from launch.
• This is despite the fact that using many of these products with Amazon Alexa is a frustrating and fragmented experience.
• A good example of this is Plex, which recently enabled an Alexa skill so that the user could control the Plex player using Alexa.
• However, because Alexa lacks the brains to make service intuitive, the user experience is so bad that one tries to control Plex with Alexa once and quickly returns to the remote control.
• In contrast to Amazon, many developers find that Google is difficult to work with and some did not even know who to at Google to call to enable Google Home with their product.
• This is the opportunity for Google Home even though it only has around 0.5m devices in the market today.
• I think Google needs to ramp up its love and support for developers immediately and thinking that they will just turn up at Google i/o is not nearly good enough.
• There is a whole segment (home) of the digital ecosystem up for grabs right now and I still maintain that this is Google’s to lose.
• However, at the moment it is Amazon that is blazing the trail and if Alexa makes it into the majority of households before Google pulls its finger out then the game will, in all probability, already be lost.
• This will not be the first time that an inferior product will have won the day and I think there are valuable lessons that Google can learn from studying this history.
• From an investment perspective, I continue to not really like either Alphabet or Amazon preferring Baidu, Tencent and Microsoft.