The Upgrade
Google and Amazon Fought a Smart-Home Battle at CES 2019
Who won? It depends on how you look at it.
How much did consumers spend on smart-home technology in 2018? $31.4 billion. That’s how much, according to Statista. By 2022, it’ll be almost double that.
The obvious leader in all this — the company that owns a significant share of that smart-home industry — is Amazon, which has reportedly sold 100 million Alexa devices. Google, which sells a whole collection of Google Assistant-supporting home devices, controls another chunk. The two companies are locked in a battle for the heart and soul of your smart-home experience, with Apple’s HomeKit standing off to the side. Many smart-home devices were on display at CES 2019, but the tech conference did little to clarify which company is on the path to total market dominance.
Each took a different approach to capture our attention. Google was all shock and awe, blanketing the convention with billboards and constructing a ride in the style of Disney’s It’s a Small World. The thing was so massive, they poured a fresh concrete foundation to support it. Amazon surely spent a fraction of what Google did — I can’t remember a single Alexa billboard — but it still owned huge mindshare across a wide array of vendors at the show. Apple’s HomeKit and…
