We are approaching the end of the year, and this is a good time to look forward. Next week, I’ll look back and call my product of the year.
The move out of politics and the apparent war between Democrats, Republicans, and common sense is the war between Amazon and Google, which will redefine the development of digital assistants.
There is also a war between Intel and Qualcomm in the personal computing field. Both Google and Intel are behaving silly, I’m going to call the fight for Amazon and Qualcomm – but for very different reasons.
I will close with my final product of the week, in this case a product class: the recently announced joint Qualcomm Microsoft effort called “Always-Connected PC” that will result from the Intel / Qualcomm battle. Let’s do it.
Google is now synonymous with idiot
The latest Amazon vs. Google fight erupted only last week. Apparently, because Amazon does not want to sell Google’s Chromecast TV device or home voice-activated speaker, Google has cut access to YouTube for users of Amazon’s Fire TV and Echo shows. So, basically, Google is punishing Amazon’s customers – many of whom are also Google’s customers – for forcing Amazon to do something it doesn’t want to do.
I hope Jeff Bezos received the same type of training that I have received as an executive, and the rule is that when someone tries to blackmail you, you always take “otherwise”. In this case, the “or else” possibility is not as bad for Amazon as it is for Google. (By the way, the reason is that if you ever give in to blackmail, you own the person who blackmails you.)
There is a huge difference between a retailer not carrying a product and an open web service provider, which cuts the advertising revenue of vast groups of users. Google creates advertising revenue from YouTube, regardless of how users use the service. YouTube is a recurring revenue stream, and when it comes to uploaded videos, YouTube is basically a monopoly right now.
Yes, you can go to Bing, but Bing largely closes YouTube (which suggests that Amazon may have an interesting change with Microsoft). Amazon, while not as powerful as Google, has a huge customer base – and separating this base can be problematic for Google.
On the other hand, Google, which basically owns search on the web, has many avenues to go around Amazon or Apple. (Apple stores do not carry Google products either for obvious reasons.)
Amazon’s likely response is to find an alternative to YouTube. Whether it’s blessing Bing, coming up with its own AWS-based video streaming service, funded to steal market share from Google, or finding another partner to close the gap Ho, it is likely that it will be bad for YouTube.
Google’s action is not only an example of the classic abuse of power, it is incredibly stupid. The rule of the industry is that while you can certainly attack a competitor, you never go after ordinary customers for an outcome. By doing this you have too much focus on excessive market power, outshining competitors, and hurting revenue in both the short and long run.
Therefore, I hope that Amazon will prevail without any other reason, which, at least not in this instance, behave foolishly and turn customers into cannon fodder. If Google expands this and cuts the combined Amazon / Google customers search, I expect Google to search even faster that the monopoly of abuse ends badly.
Now we know what ‘I’ is in Intel Stands
Over the years, many companies have tried to outsell Intel from IBM to AMD. The company’s close focus on technology and large-scale dominance always allows it to prevail. However, when Intel went after the smartphone market and failed, it opened up a very different opportunity for failure.
My own view was that Qualcomm has a smartphone market and Intel-owned PCs. The battlefield would have been bullets, and the company that prevailed with the tablet would use that success to challenge the respective contestants in their respective PCs or smartphones.
Instead of focusing on tablets, Intel prematurely went after smartphones – but without the tablet foundation, it was routed. Smartphones became largely redundant for making tablets, and this allowed Qualcomm to move to PCs.
I am with Qualcomm and the analysts at Qualcomm’s massive aerial program, where the company is demonstrating why it is superior to Intel in the broader sense as it rolls out its all-connected PC platform.
During this same window, Intel has made huge cuts to its own media outreach and analyst support. This means that Qualcomm has moved to Intel’s protected space, virtually unpublished with Microsoft support.
