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 foisti...