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 o...