Google vs. Amazon – Stuck at 2.

Google fails again to close on Alexa.

• While Google is rapidly increasing the number of skills available for the assistant, it has failed to materially close the gap on Amazon in 2018, giving just another indication that the best product might not win this battle.
• In January 2019, Google Assistant had 4,253 skills in the USA up 141% YoY while Amazon increased that count to 56,750 up some 104% YoY in the same period and market (voicebot.ai).
• Google now has 7.5% the number of skills that Amazon Alexa has compared to the 7.1% it had 12 months ago showing just how little ground it has made up despite 141% YoY growth.
• I have long believed that the straight skills to skills comparison is not an accurate one but Google’s failure to make any real headway is worrisome.
• I don’t think the straight skill count comparison coveys the full picture because it does not take into account the quality of the skills in question.
• Amazon’s mindset is one of experimentation. (In fact Echo was one of its random experiments that worked).
• This means that it has happy to let anyone create a skill and release it onto Alexa with almost no checks and balances.
• The result is a high number of skills but also a high number of very low quality, and sometimes completely, useless skills.
• Google, on the other hand, is more rigorous with its vetting and so it is more effort on the part of the developer to get make a skill available for the assistant.
• The net result is a much lower total number of skills, but the average quality of those skills is much higher.
• I think that it is pretty safe to say that almost everything the user would want to do with Alexa can also be done with Google Assistant but often it is the long tail that makes all the difference.
• For example, in search it is Google’s ability to cover the long tail that makes it so much better than Bing or any of the other competing offerings.
• This is not good news for Google because it has the advantage of being native on a huge number of smartphones where Alexa is absent as well as being fundamentally a better product.
• Hence, I was expecting Google to make up ground on Amazon in 2018 in terms of smart speakers, skills and the smart home.
• None of these has happened and Google has made up very little ground and remains firmly stuck in the distant No. 2 slot.
• Hence, it increasingly looks like the smart home may end up being a repeat of the VHS / Betamax battle where the inferior product wins the day.
• Amazon is rapidly becoming more than a gadfly to Google and now easily qualifies as a thorn it its side.
• That being said, I still can’t behind Amazon’s valuation and would stick with Google over Amazon any day of the week.