If you're like me, remembering how different using a mobile phone was back in 2006 is getting increasingly difficult. That's because today we live in a world so completely transformed by the iPhone, it seems as if it's always been that way.
But looking back, things were indeed very different. If you used a smartphone at all back then (something the vast majority of consumers did not), chances are it was a Blackberry. If you tried to use the Internet on your phone, you might remember the "mobile Internet" experience, such as it was, was pretty horrible. Most consumers at the time still used basic feature phones, and industry analysts predicted that smartphone adoption would grow, but not at nearly the eye-popping rate we would soon see in the age of the iPhone.
Echo Effect?
As we now know, the transformative nature of the iPhone quickly changed nearly every assumption we had about mobile phones and, as a result, had a ripple effect that resulted in nearly every company in mobile (and pretty much every industry) changing their own approach to the market.
In many ways, I think the the Amazon Echo is an equally transformative product for the smart home. Whether it's how early Echo owners are interacting with their device or its how Amazon itself is rewriting the rules of competition, the two products share a number of industry-disrupting similarities.
Consider the following:
Echo is Moving Consumers Toward A New Interaction Paradigm
In 2006-7, touch screens were still viewed as something from science fiction by the mass market, a cool thing that Tom Cruise used in the Minority Report. A year later, the iPhone had launched touch on its way to becoming the dominant interaction interface of the next decade.
Echo is doing the same for voice. While others like Apple, Google and Microsoft have been introducing voice interfaces for some time, Echo's use of Alexa is more intuitive and natural, and using it is quickly becoming second nature for Echo owners to access information, entertainment services, and to control devices in their home. The performance of Echo as an always-on listening device is an important consideration here, as unlike the hit-or-miss quality of other in-home voice control efforts like that of Microsoft's Xbox, the Echo performs really well due to the huge investment by Amazon in Echo's far-field listening capabilities.
The Amazon Echo Is The Smart Home's iPhone
The Echo is A Trojan Horse
While the iPhone is an amazing piece of hardware, it's success is as much attributable to the app and services ecosystem created by Apple as the device itself. With Echo, consumers may have initially been sold on a voice-controlled wireless speaker, but what they were really getting was an amazingly powerful digital home command center. By accessing and controlling Amazon's own services, a huge variety of entertainment and information content, a growing array of third party apps and a huge number of your own connected devices, the value of your Echo grows seemingly every day.
Amazon Is Inventing Its Own Rules
The old mobile phone world thought they needed to create things like dumb-downed mobile browsers and alternative video and content delivery systems, which resulted in a much less enjoyable experience for phone users. Apple changed all that, consumers responded, and soon the entire mobile industry knew the future of the Internet was the mobile Internet.
In today's smart home, both Google and Apple felt they needed to follow the typical industry leader playbook and create their own walled garden standards for smart home and start building a market from there. The results so far have been less than awe-inspiring. For its part, Amazon decided instead to throw out the old playbook and create a product that consumers love because it worked nearly instantly with a huge number of connected devices, regardless of underlying standard. Meanwhile, Apple and Google are still trying to figure out how to make their smart home efforts work.
Smart Phone, Smart Home?
While it remains to be seen if the Echo will reach the same ubiquity of the iPhone, there is little doubt the potential of the Echo and Alexa, and similar services, are enormous. Natural voice interaction and the way it could change the control of our homes, our things and the services we use could be significant. The resulting impact on a variety of vertical markets such as elder care, home service and others could be extremely disruptive. The machine learning built into Alexa's service could begin to help our home systems anticipate our needs and provide feedback to us and to others that not only makes lives more convenient, but also safer and less costly over time. And of course, like the iPhone, the growing popularity of the Echo and Alexa will raise concerns around issues such as privacy and the creep of technology into ever facet of our lives.
All of which sounds like a big deal to me.
Michael Wolf is a smart home and IoT analyst for NextMarket Insights. You can read and subscribe to his newsletter here and hear him talk about Amazon Echo on the Smart Home Show.
