Last month, Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai made a bold statement in a letter to shareholders. After describing the evolution of computers since the nineties, from hulking desktop machines to petite portable devices, he wrote, “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the ‘device’ to fade away.” His point was that, because computing technology is becoming smaller and more powerful, computers can be built in all kinds of forms. Building devices is no longer hard. The difficult part—and the part that will distinguish products from one another—is the experience that computers facilitate.
It might seem odd, then, that on Wednesday, Pichai got onstage to hype a new device. Google Home, which the company unveiled at its annual conference for developers, is a “voice-activated home product,” in Google’s parlance, which means you can command it to do things and it will respond. It’s a cute little thing—if Wall-E had an affair with a salt shaker, their love child might look a bit like this—but it appears to have some pretty powerful capabilities: music, making dinner reservations, texting friends, and more.
It won’t be lost on gadget collectors that Amazon.com’s similar device, the Echo, which costs a hundred and eighty dollars, has already been doing these things for people since last year. The Echo is a sterner-looking product, black and stiff-spined, but according to Amazon, it has sold very well. It has also received extraordinarily positive reviews, with Farhad Manjoo of the Times recently touting it as having more promise than any other device “to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.” The Echo is so clearly the dominant product of its kind that, in his speech introducing Google Home, Pichai credited Amazon for “creating a lot of excitement” about these devices.
Google is among Silicon Valley’s most shameless copycats. Apple essentially invented the modern MP3 player and touch-screen phone; Amazon basically created the e-reader and the home assistant. Google can make no similarly strong boasts. The company certainly pursues ambitious, untried technologies—think Google Glass and self-driving cars—but those tend to be long-term passion projects for its founders and top executives. For the products that it’s releasing for consumers right now, though, Google’s strategy often seems to be to do what others are already doing, in the hope that its version will be better. Early on, this approach worked well: Google’s search engine, e-mail service, online maps, and calendar were arguably the best products of their kind. More recently, Google’s Android operating system for smartphones has also proven popular. But Google Plus, the all but unused social-networking service that came after Facebook and Twitter, was a misstep, as was the Nexus Q, the discontinued media player that followed Apple TV and Roku. (To be fair, a later attempt at a media player, Chromecast, has been more successful.)
The question is whether Home looks more like Google’s successful imitations or its failed ones. One important lesson Google may have learned is that coming late to the game matters more for some kinds of products than for others. When a new product serves a specific function, like search, e-mail, maps, and calendars, all it needs to do to succeed is to do a better job than competitors at serving that function. But with other kinds of products, the first technology of its kind attracts networks of individual users, as well as outside companies who want to hook their services into it. The presence of those users and services strengthens the technology and makes it harder for newcomers, without similar networks, to be successful. Google Plus didn’t catch on because everyone’s friends were already on Facebook, for example. And the Nexus Q failed because, unlike similar media devices, it didn’t let people stream from non-Google services like Pandora and Netflix.
In Google’s early days, creating a successful product was simply about providing a useful service. It now has much more to do with putting your product at the center of a technology ecosystem, often spanning software and hardware, as Apple TV has done with traditional media. For Google Home to succeed where past products have failed, then, it will need to integrate its own services as well as third-party ones. Amazon has already managed this with the Echo—you can use it, for instance, to shop on Amazon.com and hail an Uber ride. Pichai said Google is working on a “comprehensive way” to get outside services plugged into Google Home but offered few details.
The Home does, though, emphasize services that Google can provide on its own. In Pichai’s letter to investors, he wrote that people use devices to retrieve information, get organized, and communicate with others. Not coincidentally, these are three things that Google is very good at facilitating, in large part because of its early successes with Web-based services like searching, mapping, calendaring, and e-mailing. “Over time, the computer itself—whatever its form factor—will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day,” he wrote.
In this light, the unveiling of Google Home wasn’t at odds with Pichai’s post-device vision; it was perfectly aligned with it. Executives only briefly mentioned the design of the hardware itself or the future availability of services from companies outside of Google. Instead they focussed on the Assistant, Google’s blandly named version of Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa (or, if you prefer, the successor to its also forgettably named Now). “Google Home lets you ask Google about anything you want to know,” Mario Queiroz, the company’s vice-president of product management, said. “It draws on seventeen years of innovation in organizing the world’s information to answer questions which are difficult for other assistants to handle.” You might ask, for instance, for Draymond Green’s jersey number, without specifying that Green is a basketball player. Then you could follow up by asking where “he” went to college, and the Assistant would understand that you were still referring to Green.
This emphasis suggests that Google might be onto something with the Home. If it can combine its strength in search with its growing expertise in artificial-intelligence technologies, in which it has been investing heavily, then Home stands a good chance of succeeding where past follow-on products have failed. Still, for it to truly work, Google will still need to spend a lot of time convincing other companies to hook their services into Google Home, and making it easy for them to do so. Google may want people to find everything they need with Google’s own services, but its users have shown that, these days, they feel differently.
