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Forget ‘Googling It.’ Amazon Wants You to ‘Alexa It.’
With its aggressive new strategy of putting Alexa everywhere, Amazon aims to build an operating system for the physical world
At its Seattle event last week, Amazon unveiled more than just an ambush of Echo devices. It also unveiled a new strategy.
While the company has been aggressively pushing Alexa into the homes of its customers for years in a bid to make it the smart assistant of choice, it now wants to put Alexa everywhere.
This is a departure from Amazon’s first Echo strategy, which was to make the devices so cheap that they were easy to buy, even if they weren’t all that appealing. Dave Limp, a senior vice president at Amazon, once told CNBC, “We try to price our products effectively at about what they cost to make.” For the past five years, Amazon has essentially given away Echo devices for free.
Now Amazon is flooding the market with such an array of Echo-enabled devices, across every possible category, that it will eventually be almost difficult to buy anything from Amazon without also acquiring some sort of Alexa capabilities.
The new products that Amazon unveiled at the Seattle event include:
- Echo Dot with Clock
- Echo Studio
- Echo Buds (Alexa headphones)
- Echo Flex (an Alexa smart plug)
- New Echo speakers
- Echo Show 8
- Echo Frame (a pair of Alexa glasses)
- Echo Loop (an Alexa ring)
- Alexa built into a range of cars
- A huge array of Alexa-enabled devices, including a microwave, alarm system, modular switches, and many more.
Amazon wants Alexa in your appliances, on your body, in your phone, and in your car. In the company’s vision for the future, Alexa will never be more than an arm’s reach away. Amazon’s aspirations don’t stop at its own hardware, either. It has invested heavily in the wider Alexa-connected ecosystem, throwing $60 million at smart thermostat company Ecobee and spending $1 billion acquiring Ring, which builds a popular — and controversial — home security…
