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Amazon's Alexa is Getting Clobbered (axios.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the first quarter of 2016, Amazon Echo held 80% of the global smart assistant market, according to marketing research firm Canalys. Chinese companies were so far behind that they registered zero. But just a year later, Amazon has collapsed to a 28% market share, behind Google Home's 36% and ahead of China's Alibaba and Xiaomi with a combined 19%. Amazon had a strong head start with its Echo lineup, which launched in 2014. But now it's losing ground both in the U.S. and China, the leading markets for the devices.
And are we supposed to shed crocodile tears for Amazon over this? Oh no! This one spying device now has less marketshare than a bunch of other spying devices! Oh the humanity!!
Never ends well.
>> Amazon has collapsed to a 28% market share, behind Google Home's 36% and ahead of China's Alibaba and Xiaomi with a combined 19%
This is GLOBAL share. To get to a 28%/36% global share counting the shole that is China and it's direct-to-BigBrother home "shopping/health" appliance is still pretty amazing. (That's a majority share in countries where free speech is still at least a concept.)
I still don't have a good intuition as to what the market for smart speakers is, and how large it might be. Unfortunately the blurb doesn't have any details on what the size of the market is, or how the market in 2018 might be compared to 2016. It doesn't even mention if amazon alexa sales are increasing, flat, or declining.
Look, if I have five companies, three of which are heavily subsidized and required by their large population nation states, and two of which have already achieved market saturation, I can't actually compare the small US market share of the non-subsidized companies to the quickly growing and underserved market share in India, China, and countries which have large populations and market dominance by very few subsidized players.
Wake me in five years and we'll talk about who will survive.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
when these devices are no longer dependent on internets, then they will be useful.
What else was there to compete? Amazon was the market with their Echo device back then. Market interest grew, companies threw products to catch up and voila, here we are. Further, Amazon was almost exclusively the US market only with initial Echo. This article is making it sound like Amazon had 80% of the existing market. Their own chart showing Amazon vs Google since Q1 2017 shows Amazon selling a total of about 30 mil in that range, where Google hasn't even hit 20 it seems? So, yeah, Q1 2018 google outsold them, but I think the market share of people that give a crap about these devices has already bought their device.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these devices, find them useless.
The "article" is vacuous. Shorter than even a typical USA today article. Have attention spans reached that low now in the age of smart phones? No article longer than the mean time between twitter update beeps to nudge your attention away.
Anyhow the claim of the article is because foreign based internet systems do poorly in the chinese market that Chinese people buy home domestic systems.
Presumably the reverse it true. I'm not tempeted to buy a TenCent or baidu based smart speaker for my home in the USA.
To say this means Amazon is collapsing because they don't share in a particular market says nothing about how their market share of their target market is doing. It's like saying all other languages besides cantonese and mandarin are failing because more people speak those two. They have the largest and fastest growing market share of deployed languages.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Some sort of platform, that advertises that they can rapidly add servers to your platform, they could call it the Awesome Web Services platform or AWS for short!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Maybe putting a couple on the other side of the Great Chinese Firewall?
Get rid of surveillance devices in your house TODAY.
Have attention spans reached that low now in the age of smart phones?
Alexa gives me the news summary in 20 second audio snippets. So if the article is longer than that, I won't hear it.
TFA does not give any actual numbers - only relative percentages. It is possible Alexa's user base has actually grown, but since China now has some sort of similar service, the global market share percentage of Alex will have dropped. That is a pointless statistic, especially if Amazon has not been targeting China in the first place.
Better known as 318230.
This is only a temporary blip on the Amazon plan to be the only retailer left standing outside China.
I'm (not) looking forward to the day when a few bought politicians get a law passed to make having at least one 'smart device'(Aka 'the spy') in every home a legal requirement.
Bezos is Watching you!
Well, you may also consider that those who do have one in their house willingly just actually deserve to be under surveillance. Some kind of natural selection.
The problem though is that it has indeed long-term impact on all of us, even those that refuse to have those kind of devices. Because the more people will use them, the more they are bound to become, first, a commodity, then eventually become mandatory (of course for national security reasons). This logical path is so obvious that I have a really hard time believing that it won't actually happen. Hope to be proven wrong.
You're lucky your comment fits in 144 characters otherwise I wouldn't have read it.
#DeleteFacebook
By how else will I let Jeff Bezos and the NSA know when I'm taking a dump or having some supreme buttsex session with my boyfriend?
I use a TRS-80 for my smartspeaker. It usually lets out the first syllable before running out of memory.
Facebook based National/World ID required for all citizens. Smart Speaker National/World Security Device required in every home and office.
Somebody will think that's far-fetched, but it's a logical conclusion to the direction we're heading.
First, Alexa devices are sold at cost, so they are mostly a better deal.
Second, only Alexa takes my orders for stuff to be delivered the next day.
The others just switch on the lights and open the front door.
...of the full proper name. They don't count.
this is funny
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Some products only will be interesting to a certain amount of users. Certainly the AI crowd buying a Alexa or Google Home devices won't appeal to everyone. I doubt these devices will require owners to upgrade very often. I found the Echo I bought a novelty more then useful. Nice tool to get weather, listen to music, or ask a question. Which I found might or might not be answered. Basically, they all need more work and improvement to be useful more then they are now.
In the US, I know exactly 0 people with a Google Home. I know a bunch of people with Alexa though. This is very subjective, so maybe it's a regional or country level thing?
Tell us the story again about "Alexa."
When I got my two Alexa Echo's it was primarily to easily play my own mp3 collection in some rooms, but it has a few other extra features, like radio stations etc that were good.
Fast forward to today, Amazon have announced that I will no longer be able to play my own collection through Alexa, and they'll cut me off next year.
I'm pissed at them, and hope the new generation of devices that give user choice, rather than lock-in to a subscription model, win.
I'll be perfectly happy if the innovators are Chinese. I'd rather reward their skill than their place of founding.
Dude should be able to get a fucking deal. Besides, it's white collar shit, he'll be out in no time.
Because the more people will use them, the more they are bound to become, first, a commodity, then eventually become mandatory (of course for national security reasons). This logical path is so obvious that I have a really hard time believing that it won't actually happen. Hope to be proven wrong.
You, and the guy below you, really sound like trollololololols. I'll just say this: if I'm still alive and the world has become that far gone, then I won't want to keep living in it -- and I'd take as many jackbooted thugs with me as I could before they nailed me.
Heh, that might be fun: Put together soundtracks from gay porn and snuff films on a PMP on infinte repeat, and stick it and an Alexa or Google device in an otherwise soundproof box.
Okay Google, what do I have in my pocket? What is OnStar? Are my pictures on facebook even though I don't have an account? What is GEDmatch?
The horror show is only beginning. Think about the grievous privacy violations of the early 2000s. "OMG, RealPlayer sends a unique ID (a cookie). OMG, Intel pentium III is going to have a unique identifier!"
Seems downright quaint now. These days, Intel ships backdoors in every CPU since 2010 and nobody gives a flying fuck. Then on to mobile phones with backdoored baseband processors and sealed batteries in case you thought you'd get smart and remove the geo-tracking for a little while. Uber advances the creepiness to geo-locating you every 30 seconds, even when you aren't using it. Still nobody cares.
So, here's how you predict the future. Imagine the worst possible thing for privacy. That's the new normal in 5 years or less. By then, adjust your expectations, and repeat.
Using Alexa is like trying to build a command syntax at a DOS or Linux prompt. Google Home is much more natural to talk to.
What are /. opinions of Mycroft.ai? For those who've never heard of it, it is a commercial effort to create and maintain open-source software to compete with Alexa & co..
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...but there's no bias in this review. Nope, none whatsoever! (yeah right)