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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.
Just because the market share of Alexa went down doesn't mean the absolute numbers of Alexa devices are down. There are now even more devices spying, but not from Amazon, and they are dwarfing Amazon's numbers.
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.
To be fair... yeah, they all track everything you do with those devices. I find Google's to be more invasive though.
If you adjust ANY privacy settings in your google profile to not track you then the Google Home won't work. You have to completely open yourself up to google and have wide-open inadvisable permissions in your google account just to use the Google Home. Because I told Google not to track certain aspects of my web browser google home won't work.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
How does it feel to have a multi lane highway for surveillance running down your wife’s throat and out her ass? I wouldn’t do that to someone I love.