What Exactly is Google Selling? (Premium)

Each year, Amazon announces a tsunami of new Alexa-powered products. And each year, Google counters with … what? A handful of new Assistant-powered products announced with all the excitement of a college economics class. And, even more quietly, by killing off a few of the products it released in previous years.

To Google’s fans, this aggressive approach to dealing with its most unsuccessful offerings is seen as some kind of a strength, a decisive mindset that ensures that only the best products survive. But Google’s constant killing off of products and services should weigh heavily on anyone in or considering investing in the search giant’s ecosystem. Such as it is.

As bad, Google has a serious image problem that needs to be addressed: It highlighted trust, user privacy, and a “helpful home” mantra (repeatedly) during this week’s event without confronting the reality that most of its customers believe that Google is untrustworthy and is constantly violating their privacy. That “helpful home” bit? It’s like the stalker in a movie who knows a little bit too much about their intended victim and then slips up by revealing he knows their name even though she never told him that. That’s not how trust is established.

I’ve argued in the past that the smart home—or the broader market for what I call and others “ambient computing,” a term Google amusingly appropriated at the event (which makes sense, as they do steal everything)—is Google’s to lose. That it can tap a vast well of AI smarts to overpower Amazon or any other company save, perhaps, Microsoft. But that hasn’t happened.

The reasons for that are many, but Microsoft’s defeat in the smart home can be tied as decisively to the same core problem that dogs Google today: It just isn’t all-in.

In the days of yore, when a querulous Bill Gates ran Microsoft and thus the entire personal computing industry, all Microsoft had to do was claim that it was “betting the company” on a product, technology, or initiative, and it would just happen like magic. The entire company ground to a halt to embrace and extend the Internet, to reorient all of its products around .NET, and to deeply embed trust into everything it did with Trustworthy Computing.

These days, Microsoft’s approach is a lot more subtle, and the resulting products fail as a result. And Google has the same problem.

You can look at this from a micro-level or a macro level and see the same patterns repeating themselves.

Consider something innocuous like the small smart speakers that both Amazon and Google sell in order to attract a mass market of customers in the days before the functionality they provide is just embedded in everything else. Here, Amazon innovated with the Echo Dot, and the original version was pure Amazon: Cheap and cheaply made, with a boring plastic body that screamed, well, cheap. By the second generation, both Amazon and Google (with Home Mini) were foisting more attractive, cloth-bound versions of the same thing. And by gen three, you can see the result of feedback and real-world usage. Amazon added a truly useful digital clock to the Dot. And Google added a hole in the back so you can hang one on a wall. With a power cable dangling down to the power receptacle. Seriously. Which one looks downmarket now?

What’s amazing here is that Amazon has been denied the single biggest market imaginable for pushing Alexa and its related services because Google basically owns the smartphone market and can get the magic of Assistant in front of literally several billion people every single day. Fortunately for Amazon, it does own the world’s most popular retail store, and it can sell its wares from that much-visited website. But only Amazon has truly leveraged its strengths. And it is throwing every imaginable product it can against the wall to see what sticks. Some of it sounds crazy—smart glasses, smart buds, a weird glowing “companion,” whatever—but some do stick.

Meanwhile, nothing Google makes seems to stick or, in the case of its Pixel smartphones, even work properly. And the firm has little stomach for risk: It has repeatedly canceled plans for a Pixel smartwatch and, in doing so, it has ceded that market to Apple and, of course, to Siri as well. That’s dumb: It’s better to fail for multiple generations than to just give up, since you can at least improve on mistakes. It’s much harder to jump out with a v1 release after your main competitor and the market leader has built up their product over several years. Caving like this is the opposite of leadership.

Yes, companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung, each of which make their own digital assistant and have designs on a smart home infrastructure all make their own mistakes, and each has moved slowly (Apple) or not at all (Microsoft) to make any headway in certain areas. But Google is interesting because it is the most obvious company to dominate the smart home, because it knows so much about its customers, and not just about what they buy (like Amazon). That it is not aggressively attacking this market, but is instead preaching about trust, privacy, and helpfulness, is almost pathetic.

Google, no one really trusts you, at least not anyone who is not blissfully unaware of how damaging it is to sell your soul to the firm just to get slightly better advertising. And you can’t gain trust by just talking about it. You gain trust by doing. And part of that doing means not constantly undoing the products and services you previously released. If you can’t be trusted to do that, how on earth would anyone trust you with their private information?

This battle isn’t over, of course, and Google could still surprise me by actually stepping up to the plate and swinging instead of just showing up and hoping for the walk. But only Amazon has shown itself truly serious about the smart home, and its annual tsunami of product releases and the resulting functional expansion of its ecosystem is both awe-inspiring and just plain inspiring. I get no such feeling from Google or its tired annual hardware events, and this year’s rendition was particularly bad. It makes me really question why I or anyone else should bother even pretending that what they’re doing is in any way relevant.

So, maybe the smart home is still Google’s to lose. But maybe they’ve already lost or given up.