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'OK Google, give everybody in America a free speaker'
Alphabet Inc. should give every household in America a free Google Home Mini smart speaker, a Morgan Stanley analyst suggested Thursday.
The speakers currently retail for $49 each, which would mean spending about $3.3 billion. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote Thursday that would be a "small price to pay" for Google-parent Alphabet. He estimated that the company could compensate for that cost about five times over through the operating profits it generates more generally from retail search over the next five years.
Nowak worries that Google is losing ground to Amazon.com Inc. when it comes to retail search queries, given that more purchases are being made through voice commands and Amazon is widely thought to have a lead on Google in terms of smart-speaker penetration. He projects that roughly 70% of households will have speakers by 2022, and that Amazon will have 1.3 times more speakers in homes than Google will at that point, absent any dramatic action.
Also at VentureBeat and CNBC.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 01 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
"One of the first things I did on my iPad was disable Siri as thoroughly as possible."
translated reads...
"i willingly fund the enemies of free humanity every chance i get, but i'm 'concerned' about my privacy so i clicked on some Slave Reassurance Buttons to make myself feel better. i don't care about the closed source modem firmware or the baseband OS doing whatever the hell they want, assuming i'm dumb enough to trust the main slaveOS"
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Sunday July 01 2018, @11:57PM
Hey, if there was a viable 10" open source tablet (hardware and software), I'd be all for it and would have gladly chosen it instead. Sadly, there isn't. The iPad is the bad choice in a sea of terrible choices. I had hoped that Sailfish and the Jolla tablet would take off, but c'est la vie.