Google and Microsoft AI Missteps

August 14, 2017

I read an interesting article called “Former Microsoft Exec Reveals Why Amazon’s Alexa Voice Assistant Beat Cortana.” The passage I noted as thought provoking was this one:

Qi Lu, formerly a Microsoft wizard and now a guru at Baidu allegedly said in this passage from the Verge’s article:

Lu believes Microsoft and Google “made the same mistake” of focusing on the phone and PC for voice assistants, instead of a dedicated device. “The phone, in my view, is going to be, for the foreseeable future, a finger-first, mobile-first device,” explains Lu. “You need an AI-first device to solidify an emerging base of ecosystems.”

Apparently Lu repeated what I think is a key point:

“The phone, in my view, is going to be, for the foreseeable future, a finger-first, mobile-first device,” explains Lu. “You need an AI-first device to solidify an emerging base of ecosystems.”

Several questions occurred to me:

Do Google and Microsoft share a similar context for evaluating high value technologies? Perhaps these two companies are more alike in how they see the world than Amazon?
Are Google and Microsoft reactive; that is, the companies act in a reflexive manner with regard to figuring out how to apply a magnetic technology?
Is Amazon’s competitive advantage an ability to think about an interesting technology in terms of the technology’s ability to augment an existing revenue stream and open new revenue streams?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. If Lu is correct, Amazon has done an end run around Google and Microsoft in terms of talking to gizmos. Can Amazon sustain its technological momentum? With Microsoft floundering with Windows 10 and hardware reliability, it is possible that its applied research is mired in the Microsoft management morass. Google, on the other hand, has its hands full with Amazon taking more product search traffic at a time when Google has to figure out how to solve emotional, political, and ideological issues. Need I say “damore”?

Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2017

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.