7 ms·

This is a shame. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty awkward gaming accessory, but outside the context of gaming people were doing some pretty fun things with it. A

This is a shame. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty awkward gaming accessory, but outside the context of gaming people were doing some pretty fun things with it. A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend. That last statement is just as true now as it was when the Kinect originally came out. Gives me some strange feels about the current state of the tech economy. The Kinect is being retired at the same time Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones. Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Same can be said for VR. Bitcoin, and blockchain by extension, originated from a white paper published by someone who's still to this day a complete mystery. Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.

microcolonel 9y ago
> ridiculously cheap cost I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
- Benjammer 9y ago
  Isn't this the backbone of the entire console gaming industry though? Has there ever been a popular console that directly turned a profit through hardware sales? I was under the impression that basically the entire revenue stream comes from game licensing fees from publishers, with hardware as loss leaders across the board.
  - Tyr42 9y ago
    Wii, and in general Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
  - dcole2929 9y ago
    Generally they are sold for a loss to begin with early in the generation. But later iterations usually make money. As a whole, successful consoles, usually can make money for the company producing them. That said both PS3 and Xbox 360 lost money for their respective companies. I believe the Wii and the PS2 however were great financial successes though.
    - jedrek 9y ago
      Yeah, but the real money is in licensing.
  - hmschreck 9y ago
    Up until the WiiU, Nintendo had sold, if memory serves, every console at a profit. The issue here is that it's being bought without games. They lose money on the tech, and then don't make it up on the licensing.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    Iirc the Wii sold at a profit because it deliberately used older technology.
  - kabdib 9y ago
    AFAIK, all of the recent consoles have been profit making on just the hardware alone. Not very much money per unit at first, but none of them shipped as a loss leader.
  - ifhd 9y ago
    Wasn't nintendo making money on the Wii pretty much the entire time?
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    Weren't schools buying Playstations for a bit because they were cheaper than computers with similar specs? I swear that was a thing for a while, but I can't find any sources, so I might be mis-remembering
    - xanderstrike 9y ago
      Schools and governments were buying up PS3 systems because they could be turned into cheap clusters. Sony didn't like this, as they were losing money on every PS3, so they disabled the functionality.
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
Tech giants don't invent cool things, they buy cool inventions that might become trendy, and dump them if they don't. Their dominance seems to have further pervaded the notion that utility and viability = profitability within this system.
- dcole2929 9y ago
  Having invented something is only useful if you're actually able to get that something into peoples hands. As much as I hate how people drool over overpriced Apple hardware, they've done a great job putting greenfield tech into the hands of consumers. Microsoft conversely actually does "invent" a lot of cool things, but for the last 20 years they've been pretty bad at turning those cool things into successful things
Pica_soO 9y ago
Its cooperate culture, which allows for nay-Sayers to show the Nay-Emails and meeting-logs as trophy's of successful predictions. If you want to kill this, you need a cooperate culture, that anonymizes project critic and punishes claims of authorship to critique.
sova 9y ago
Very nicely said, your last sentence expertly crafted.
awalton 9y ago
It's not really a shame. The Kinect is out of date and never caught on, and there are much better newer sensors that play the same role for researchers and experimenters. If you'd buy a Kinect for hacking, you'd buy Intel's Euclid or another RealSense camera, e.g. If anything, it's surprising Microsoft kept building and subsidizing these things for as long as they did.
- ipsum2 9y ago
  Except the Intel RealSense line-up does maybe 1/4th of what the Kinect does, and Intel is known for killing off pet projects quickly (see IoT)
swang 9y ago
i mean, the amazon echo was a pretty interesting new thing that they created a market for. tthen once they realized people were buying it every big tech company jumped on it to not get behind. the problem is if google doesn't go into the "speaker with a voice assistant" space, they allow amazon to possibly gain dominance in said space. this is why everyone wants to get in on drone delivery, self-driving cars, vr, etc.. and while "creative", the kinect wasn't a thing microsoft invented either. in fact, primesense, the company that created the original kinect got bought out by apple, and basically that tech is in the iphone x now.
- ifhd 9y ago
  But at some point shouldn't someone stop to question how valuable the space really is? I suppose at least the data is worth a lot towards better voice control efforts.
  - swang 9y ago
    a device that's sitting in the home is priceless to a company. not even for the data they get. it's because the next device they buy they'll think of devices that will work with the one they've already bought. have an amazon echo? they'll probably buy speakers that support alexa, car integrations with alexa, etc..
squarefoot 9y ago
"A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend" This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license. In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.
- cbhl 9y ago
  Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple? My impression is the top sensor bar in the iPhone X is essentially a miniaturized Kinect, so we should see more Kinect-like applications now that it fits in your pocket.
  - ansgri 9y ago
    AFAIR, it was acquired by ASUS. Original Kinect was developed by an Israel company Xtion, which now lives as a trademark of ASUS game accessories: https://www.asus.com/3D-Sensor/All-Series/ https://www.asus.com/3D-Sensor/All-Series/ The core technology (structured light in iPhone X and Kinect 1, ToF in Kinect 2) is rather straightforward (for a computer vision researcher, that is...), it's hardware (embedded CPU, cheap sensors and lasers) that enabled its mass adoption.
    - brutus1213 9y ago
      How does primesense fit into it? I thought primesense was the company acquired by apple?
      - ansgri 9y ago
        Don't know about primesense, I was answering to "Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple?".
    - 9y ago
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
The one _very_ successful aspect of the Kinect was it's speech recognition capabilities. People saying: "Xbox Play Netflix" - that very much preceded the current boom in what you accurately describe as the hockey puck speakers. Another much under-appreciated aspect of Kinect was what an absolutely phenomenal video conferencing system it was - using Skype on Xbox was on par with expensive custom systems. Great speakerphone (that audio recognition) and it would resize the focus on the fly to include all the faces in the room (panning around).
donavanm 9y ago
> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. Youre either misrepresenting or woefully misunderstanding this. The echo et al are no more about selling a $50 shopping list speaker than when Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Sony were going at over $50 e-ink readers.
ptx 9y ago
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Also don't forget that Sony Ericsson released the MBW-100 smartwatch[1] several years before Kickstarter existed ... so I'm not sure how they could have originated on Kickstarter. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=385SISfXUNU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=385SISfXUNU
- homero 9y ago
  I bought those watch and loved it, sadly the oled screen died out
ifhd 9y ago
> they seem mostly resigned to following trends The speaker thing was Amazon creating a trend (or fad if you really see it that way).
giobox 9y ago
The tech was extremely impressive, but it always seemed like a classic case of a solution looking for a problem, which to me it's apparent biggest successes as a tool in universities/research groups bore out. Great for Human Computer Interaction type research, everything else not so much it seemed. At any rate, the idea lives on in Apple's iPhone X in a much more practical application. > Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. This is a big stretch, in my opinion. I think we'd have worked out that a screen on our wrist with useful info is nice regardless of what happened on Kickstarter, this wasn't exactly an incredible discovery. There had been countless fitness tracking watches that aren't really all that far removed from the public want from smart watches from Garmin et al long before Pebble tried their thing too. The barrier was arguably getting efficient SoCs that could last a day doing something useful far more than it was anything to do with crowd funding. > Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold. This is getting a bit silly now.
dwighttk 9y ago
"hockey puck that can add things to your shopping list" sounds a whole lot better than "always-on video phone" which they are also competing to put on your shelf. (and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
andrepd 9y ago
>Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible is only too obvious. The only thing more shameful than them pushing this garbage is the consumers' willingness to eat it all up.
- PopsiclePete 9y ago
  Which is why you buy it, and when not at home, play really loud, awkward and uncomfortable recordings of someone having bad, sweaty, cringe-inducing sex. For hours on end. If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches? Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.
  - SllX 9y ago
    Overwhelming with garbage data is definitely something you can do with social network trackers, it's definitely something I engaged in when I was most active on Facebook. That said it seems to me the far better solution, if you actually value your privacy, is to give up the convenience it would offer and simply not let systems like this into your house. In a fight to protect your privacy, the only way to win is to not willingly give up your data, even if that means not making use of new systems or taking active countermeasures against tracking systems.
  - andrepd 9y ago
    Overwhelming with garbage data is definitely a good tactice to pollute the nice data they collect. See https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
brandall10 9y ago
I used to work at a telemedicine company that uses the Kinect as the primary input for their core product, to enable at-home physical therapy. Before I left we were doing the work to transition to v2 and were well aware that it was not an earner for MS, but I think the prevailing notion was this was too important to the research community and MS was in it for the long game hoping for it to take off in other industries. In any case, I reached out to a friend there who tells me they were aware of this eventuality for some time and have another option (smaller, more accurate) that they are in the process of migrating to.
tengbretson 9y ago
I think most of your analysis is spot-on, however. > Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Smartwatches have been a techno-futurist pie-in-the-sky product for almost 50 years now.
- caseyohara 9y ago
  Yes but it was proven to be commercially viable on Kickstarter
  - giobox 9y ago
    Given the fate of Pebble just ~3 years or so after launching their original watch, I’d question that it proved the commercial viability! Apple outselling Rolex in 2016 (the same year Pebble died) arguably did far more to cement this, and in a significantly shorter period of time.
    - ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
      Rolex is a luxury watch maker. The cheapest Rolex you can get is more than 5000 dollars. To say they market to different audiences would be an extreme understatement.
      - giobox 9y ago
        While this is true, it in no way makes my point any less valid. Pebble went out of business, the very opposite of commercial viability. Apple went on to outsell a 4.7 billion dollar player in close to a year. If the choice of Rolex offends, insert the name of more or less any other watch manufacturer you like, the comparison usually stands, or at the least shows the exceptional sales the line achieved in a short period of time. If anything, it's even more impressive when one compares to 2016 revenues of cheaper watch makers such as Seiko, Fossil, Citizen etc.
jcrites 9y ago
> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker [...]. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones. I don't think you're giving these companies adequate credit for their innovation. :-) It's worth remembering that the Echo, a voice-powered home assistant that can be spoken to anywhere in a room ("far-field" voice recognition), was novel when Amazon introduced it. Similarly, the digital e-ink reader was novel when Amazon launched the Kindle. Two other concepts that seem novel to me are the Amazon Go stores (checkout-less shopping) and Amazon Prime Air (automated drone delivery), both works-in-progress. Consider Amazon Web Services (est. 2006) and the cloud services boom. Amazon created the first devices/services that resulted in the trends for home assistants and ebook readers (etc.), so I don't think it's fair to name them as "mostly resigned to following trends". Similarly, although Google seems to have followed Amazon's lead with respect to home assistants, it's certainly innovating in the capabilities of their service, and in other areas. Google's voice assistant has access to incredible amounts of information, presumably powered by Google's search and understanding of questions and context. While both Alexa and Google can answer "When was Abraham Lincoln born?", only Google can more difficult questions like "Who was the second CEO of Microsoft?" (per my test today). However, none of the offerings can yet answer "When was the second CEO of Microsoft born?" Boiling the situation down to shopping lists ignores the capability variation in products. Of course every company will follow trends to some extent, since to do otherwise is to give up a potential market segment. Companies don't exist per se to create trends; they exist to capitalize on business opportunities. A lot of the big tech companies have expertise they can leverage to enter new tech segments, or have related services that they can integrate. E.g., if Apple has Siri and the Apple TV, then a home assistant may still be a sensible play, even if Amazon did it first. Trying to create a new trend is risky and requires large investment. For every hit like the Echo, you might strike out like the Fire Phone; for every hit like the Pixel phone you might strike out like Google Glass or have moderate success like Kinect. It makes sense for companies to create offerings when there's a proven model to follow in addition to investing in new innovative ideas. If following is the only thing a company does, then you might judge them as not being innovative; but before you do that, you should look at the innovative things they're trying too, such as the Glass, the Kindle, the Kinect. Apple has been incredibly innovative in their phone design and security features: the first to offer a touch-based phone with no keyboard (as far as I know); the first to offer fingerprint-based unlock instead of PIN code unlock (so convenient!), and now face-recognition based unlock; Siri may have been the first useful voice assistant. Apple's security and privacy has been industry-leading, e.g. Secure Enclave. Apple CarPlay is a great experience and surpasses every other car integration system I've used. I believe that the reason all of the named companies have continued to be successful and remain market leaders is because they are innovating in products and services.

microcolonel 9y ago

> ridiculously cheap cost I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.

Benjammer 9y ago
Isn't this the backbone of the entire console gaming industry though? Has there ever been a popular console that directly turned a profit through hardware sales? I was under the impression that basically the entire revenue stream comes from game licensing fees from publishers, with hardware as loss leaders across the board.
- Tyr42 9y ago
  Wii, and in general Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
- dcole2929 9y ago
  Generally they are sold for a loss to begin with early in the generation. But later iterations usually make money. As a whole, successful consoles, usually can make money for the company producing them. That said both PS3 and Xbox 360 lost money for their respective companies. I believe the Wii and the PS2 however were great financial successes though.
  - jedrek 9y ago
    Yeah, but the real money is in licensing.
- hmschreck 9y ago
  Up until the WiiU, Nintendo had sold, if memory serves, every console at a profit. The issue here is that it's being bought without games. They lose money on the tech, and then don't make it up on the licensing.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Iirc the Wii sold at a profit because it deliberately used older technology.
- kabdib 9y ago
  AFAIK, all of the recent consoles have been profit making on just the hardware alone. Not very much money per unit at first, but none of them shipped as a loss leader.
- ifhd 9y ago
  Wasn't nintendo making money on the Wii pretty much the entire time?
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Weren't schools buying Playstations for a bit because they were cheaper than computers with similar specs? I swear that was a thing for a while, but I can't find any sources, so I might be mis-remembering
  - xanderstrike 9y ago
    Schools and governments were buying up PS3 systems because they could be turned into cheap clusters. Sony didn't like this, as they were losing money on every PS3, so they disabled the functionality.

LMYahooTFY 9y ago

Tech giants don't invent cool things, they buy cool inventions that might become trendy, and dump them if they don't. Their dominance seems to have further pervaded the notion that utility and viability = profitability within this system.

dcole2929 9y ago
Having invented something is only useful if you're actually able to get that something into peoples hands. As much as I hate how people drool over overpriced Apple hardware, they've done a great job putting greenfield tech into the hands of consumers. Microsoft conversely actually does "invent" a lot of cool things, but for the last 20 years they've been pretty bad at turning those cool things into successful things

Pica_soO 9y ago

Its cooperate culture, which allows for nay-Sayers to show the Nay-Emails and meeting-logs as trophy's of successful predictions. If you want to kill this, you need a cooperate culture, that anonymizes project critic and punishes claims of authorship to critique.

sova 9y ago

Very nicely said, your last sentence expertly crafted.

awalton 9y ago

It's not really a shame. The Kinect is out of date and never caught on, and there are much better newer sensors that play the same role for researchers and experimenters. If you'd buy a Kinect for hacking, you'd buy Intel's Euclid or another RealSense camera, e.g. If anything, it's surprising Microsoft kept building and subsidizing these things for as long as they did.

ipsum2 9y ago
Except the Intel RealSense line-up does maybe 1/4th of what the Kinect does, and Intel is known for killing off pet projects quickly (see IoT)

swang 9y ago

i mean, the amazon echo was a pretty interesting new thing that they created a market for. tthen once they realized people were buying it every big tech company jumped on it to not get behind. the problem is if google doesn't go into the "speaker with a voice assistant" space, they allow amazon to possibly gain dominance in said space. this is why everyone wants to get in on drone delivery, self-driving cars, vr, etc.. and while "creative", the kinect wasn't a thing microsoft invented either. in fact, primesense, the company that created the original kinect got bought out by apple, and basically that tech is in the iphone x now.

ifhd 9y ago
But at some point shouldn't someone stop to question how valuable the space really is? I suppose at least the data is worth a lot towards better voice control efforts.
- swang 9y ago
  a device that's sitting in the home is priceless to a company. not even for the data they get. it's because the next device they buy they'll think of devices that will work with the one they've already bought. have an amazon echo? they'll probably buy speakers that support alexa, car integrations with alexa, etc..

squarefoot 9y ago

"A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend" This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license. In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.

cbhl 9y ago
Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple? My impression is the top sensor bar in the iPhone X is essentially a miniaturized Kinect, so we should see more Kinect-like applications now that it fits in your pocket.
- ansgri 9y ago
  AFAIR, it was acquired by ASUS. Original Kinect was developed by an Israel company Xtion, which now lives as a trademark of ASUS game accessories: https://www.asus.com/3D-Sensor/All-Series/ https://www.asus.com/3D-Sensor/All-Series/ The core technology (structured light in iPhone X and Kinect 1, ToF in Kinect 2) is rather straightforward (for a computer vision researcher, that is...), it's hardware (embedded CPU, cheap sensors and lasers) that enabled its mass adoption.
  - brutus1213 9y ago
    How does primesense fit into it? I thought primesense was the company acquired by apple?
    - ansgri 9y ago
      Don't know about primesense, I was answering to "Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple?".
  - 9y ago

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

The one _very_ successful aspect of the Kinect was it's speech recognition capabilities. People saying: "Xbox Play Netflix" - that very much preceded the current boom in what you accurately describe as the hockey puck speakers. Another much under-appreciated aspect of Kinect was what an absolutely phenomenal video conferencing system it was - using Skype on Xbox was on par with expensive custom systems. Great speakerphone (that audio recognition) and it would resize the focus on the fly to include all the faces in the room (panning around).

donavanm 9y ago

> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. Youre either misrepresenting or woefully misunderstanding this. The echo et al are no more about selling a $50 shopping list speaker than when Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Sony were going at over $50 e-ink readers.

ptx 9y ago

> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Also don't forget that Sony Ericsson released the MBW-100 smartwatch[1] several years before Kickstarter existed ... so I'm not sure how they could have originated on Kickstarter. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=385SISfXUNU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=385SISfXUNU

homero 9y ago
I bought those watch and loved it, sadly the oled screen died out

ifhd 9y ago

> they seem mostly resigned to following trends The speaker thing was Amazon creating a trend (or fad if you really see it that way).

giobox 9y ago

The tech was extremely impressive, but it always seemed like a classic case of a solution looking for a problem, which to me it's apparent biggest successes as a tool in universities/research groups bore out. Great for Human Computer Interaction type research, everything else not so much it seemed. At any rate, the idea lives on in Apple's iPhone X in a much more practical application. > Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. This is a big stretch, in my opinion. I think we'd have worked out that a screen on our wrist with useful info is nice regardless of what happened on Kickstarter, this wasn't exactly an incredible discovery. There had been countless fitness tracking watches that aren't really all that far removed from the public want from smart watches from Garmin et al long before Pebble tried their thing too. The barrier was arguably getting efficient SoCs that could last a day doing something useful far more than it was anything to do with crowd funding. > Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold. This is getting a bit silly now.

dwighttk 9y ago

"hockey puck that can add things to your shopping list" sounds a whole lot better than "always-on video phone" which they are also competing to put on your shelf. (and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

andrepd 9y ago

>Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible is only too obvious. The only thing more shameful than them pushing this garbage is the consumers' willingness to eat it all up.

PopsiclePete 9y ago
Which is why you buy it, and when not at home, play really loud, awkward and uncomfortable recordings of someone having bad, sweaty, cringe-inducing sex. For hours on end. If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches? Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.
- SllX 9y ago
  Overwhelming with garbage data is definitely something you can do with social network trackers, it's definitely something I engaged in when I was most active on Facebook. That said it seems to me the far better solution, if you actually value your privacy, is to give up the convenience it would offer and simply not let systems like this into your house. In a fight to protect your privacy, the only way to win is to not willingly give up your data, even if that means not making use of new systems or taking active countermeasures against tracking systems.
- andrepd 9y ago
  Overwhelming with garbage data is definitely a good tactice to pollute the nice data they collect. See https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/

brandall10 9y ago

I used to work at a telemedicine company that uses the Kinect as the primary input for their core product, to enable at-home physical therapy. Before I left we were doing the work to transition to v2 and were well aware that it was not an earner for MS, but I think the prevailing notion was this was too important to the research community and MS was in it for the long game hoping for it to take off in other industries. In any case, I reached out to a friend there who tells me they were aware of this eventuality for some time and have another option (smaller, more accurate) that they are in the process of migrating to.

tengbretson 9y ago

I think most of your analysis is spot-on, however. > Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Smartwatches have been a techno-futurist pie-in-the-sky product for almost 50 years now.

caseyohara 9y ago
Yes but it was proven to be commercially viable on Kickstarter
- giobox 9y ago
  Given the fate of Pebble just ~3 years or so after launching their original watch, I’d question that it proved the commercial viability! Apple outselling Rolex in 2016 (the same year Pebble died) arguably did far more to cement this, and in a significantly shorter period of time.
  - ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
    Rolex is a luxury watch maker. The cheapest Rolex you can get is more than 5000 dollars. To say they market to different audiences would be an extreme understatement.
    - giobox 9y ago
      While this is true, it in no way makes my point any less valid. Pebble went out of business, the very opposite of commercial viability. Apple went on to outsell a 4.7 billion dollar player in close to a year. If the choice of Rolex offends, insert the name of more or less any other watch manufacturer you like, the comparison usually stands, or at the least shows the exceptional sales the line achieved in a short period of time. If anything, it's even more impressive when one compares to 2016 revenues of cheaper watch makers such as Seiko, Fossil, Citizen etc.

jcrites 9y ago

> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker [...]. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones. I don't think you're giving these companies adequate credit for their innovation. :-) It's worth remembering that the Echo, a voice-powered home assistant that can be spoken to anywhere in a room ("far-field" voice recognition), was novel when Amazon introduced it. Similarly, the digital e-ink reader was novel when Amazon launched the Kindle. Two other concepts that seem novel to me are the Amazon Go stores (checkout-less shopping) and Amazon Prime Air (automated drone delivery), both works-in-progress. Consider Amazon Web Services (est. 2006) and the cloud services boom. Amazon created the first devices/services that resulted in the trends for home assistants and ebook readers (etc.), so I don't think it's fair to name them as "mostly resigned to following trends". Similarly, although Google seems to have followed Amazon's lead with respect to home assistants, it's certainly innovating in the capabilities of their service, and in other areas. Google's voice assistant has access to incredible amounts of information, presumably powered by Google's search and understanding of questions and context. While both Alexa and Google can answer "When was Abraham Lincoln born?", only Google can more difficult questions like "Who was the second CEO of Microsoft?" (per my test today). However, none of the offerings can yet answer "When was the second CEO of Microsoft born?" Boiling the situation down to shopping lists ignores the capability variation in products. Of course every company will follow trends to some extent, since to do otherwise is to give up a potential market segment. Companies don't exist per se to create trends; they exist to capitalize on business opportunities. A lot of the big tech companies have expertise they can leverage to enter new tech segments, or have related services that they can integrate. E.g., if Apple has Siri and the Apple TV, then a home assistant may still be a sensible play, even if Amazon did it first. Trying to create a new trend is risky and requires large investment. For every hit like the Echo, you might strike out like the Fire Phone; for every hit like the Pixel phone you might strike out like Google Glass or have moderate success like Kinect. It makes sense for companies to create offerings when there's a proven model to follow in addition to investing in new innovative ideas. If following is the only thing a company does, then you might judge them as not being innovative; but before you do that, you should look at the innovative things they're trying too, such as the Glass, the Kindle, the Kinect. Apple has been incredibly innovative in their phone design and security features: the first to offer a touch-based phone with no keyboard (as far as I know); the first to offer fingerprint-based unlock instead of PIN code unlock (so convenient!), and now face-recognition based unlock; Siri may have been the first useful voice assistant. Apple's security and privacy has been industry-leading, e.g. Secure Enclave. Apple CarPlay is a great experience and surpasses every other car integration system I've used. I believe that the reason all of the named companies have continued to be successful and remain market leaders is because they are innovating in products and services.