This is a Tough Year to Bet on Ecosystems (Premium)

With Big Tech reeling in the wake of the pandemic-era boom, Amazon, Google, and others are quietly backing away from ecosystems in which they’ve invested many billions of dollars over several years. But the impact on those customers who have embraced those ecosystems will be just as negative, and that’s even more true because these companies are not communicating how and where they’re cutting back. And there are going to be hurt feelings all around.

I’ve been dancing around writing about this topic for months, but a few recent revelations have reminded me how important it is to broach this topic so that we all understand what’s at stake. So I’ll start in a sort of reverse order, beginning with the most recent story that triggered my internal alarms: on Friday, 9to5Google reported that it had noticed an innocuous addition to a Google Assistant support article regarding making Duo calls on Assistant-powered smart speakers and displays.

“Google no longer provides software updates for these third-party Smart Displays: Lenovo Smart Display (7″, 8″ & 10″), JBL Link View, and LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9 Smart Display. This could impact the quality of video calls and meetings.”

Huh.

This one hit home for me because we’ve been using a 10-inch Lenovo Smart Display in our kitchen since 2018, and this is one of the few Assistant-powered devices we left online after a 2020 purge of our Google smart home equipment. We only use the Lenovo Smart Display as a glorified digital photo frame, as it rotates between several thousand photos of our kids, family, and friends. And so Google not supporting Duo calls on this thing doesn’t impact us at all. But Google no longer providing software updates for third-party smart displays—it still supports “all Google Home and Google Nest speakers and smart displays”—does. Or, I should say, it will. I’m sure this thing will work for some amount of time. And that it will then no longer work.

This isn’t surprising in some general sense: as the controversy around Sonos’ 2019 announcement about retiring legacy products demonstrated, smart products don’t last forever, and perhaps I should be happy that I’ve already gotten five years of solid usage out of this thing with more time to come. But this isn’t about Google ending support for a specific 2018 Lenovo Smart Display. It’s about Google ending support for all Lenovo smart displays, no matter the age. All third-party smart displays.

Put another way, this is Google scaling back its platform ambitions and not really telling anyone that it is doing so. And because it is so secretive about its plans, is in fact just quietly sweeping them under the proverbial carpet, its customers are left twisting in the wind. Some, like me, are just engaged enough to have discovered this little tidbit of news in a news feed and so can thus begin thinking about the future. But most have no idea that there is a potential apocalypse coming for the Google Assistant devices on which they rely. Yes, it’s possible that Google will do the right thing and “support” those devices for some number of years, meaning let them stay up and running. But it’s more likely, given that this is Google, that it will not do so. Google, after all, has a well-earned reputation for mercilessly killing off products it has lost interest in.

And Google has lost interest in Google Assistant.

In late March—and in the second incident in this reverse time frame—we learned via a leaked internal memo from vice president Sissie Hsiao that her team was transitioning into a new role supporting Bard, the Google AI technology that will compete with ChatGPT, Bing chatbot, and the other AI-based platforms that suddenly appeared a few months ago. And that in keeping with CEO Sundar Pichai’s late 2022 promise that the firm would need to focus on only those products and services that were financially viable, that Google Assistant, too, would “focus on [those] deliveries” that would most “impact [its] users.”

This makes sense on one level—from what I can see, these new AI products are basically just next-generation digital assistants—but there is uncertainty about what form the resulting products and services will take when we emerge on the other side. Stepping back in time yet again, I saw multiple reports from CES 2023 in January that Google Assistant—and, not coincidentally, Amazon Alexa—was nowhere to be found at the sprawling event, while it was prominently marketed at previous shows. That is, instead of putting the focus on a money-losing digital assistant platform, Google instead focused on one of its two or three biggest brands, Android.

Those reports from CES followed the news in December that both Google and Amazon were cutting their investments in assistants. (Yep, still going back in time here.) Specifically, that Google would “invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google, including TVs, headphones, smart-home speakers, smart glasses and smartwatches that use Google’s Wear OS software.”

And that ties us neatly into the news hidden in that Google support document, to bring this thing full circle: Google will continue to invest in Assistant capabilities in its own devices but is stepping back from providing this functionality to partners. It is circling the wagons and being more like Apple and less like Microsoft. The ecosystem is contracting.

Of course, the fear with Google is always the same: how long before it starts cutting its own devices, too? Will there be future Google Assistant-powered Nest smart speakers and displays? Will it arbitrarily decide to kill a laptop but keep making a tablet? Are its Pixel phones safe? Where does it end?

We don’t know, and we can’t know, and Google will never admit to this retracting because doing so would kill its stock price and market value at a time in which it can ill afford any missteps like that. But trust is a fundamental component of any ecosystem buy-in, and I have no idea how anyone could trust Google right now.

Which I write having just returned to Google’s Pixel 7 Pro and having just purchased a pair of Google Pixel Buds Pro earbuds. Cue the sad trumpet sound.

To be fair, it’s not just Google: Amazon’s plans for Alexa and compatible devices are currently unknown and most likely in flux. And other Big Tech firms are facing the same types of decisions about the right places to focus and the right places to scale back. All we can do, really, is sit back, wait for the fallout, and hope that the bets we made aren’t undercut by the new realities facing this industry that we rely on for so much.