Author: Jan Dawson

I’m in a contemplative mood this week, as this is my final column for Techpinions, and as such I thought I’d share a few big picture thoughts on the state of the tech market in late 2017. It strikes me that from a consumer perspective, in many ways we’ve never had it so good, but at the same time there are new threats and concerns which are also unprecedented. We will therefore be tempted to seek regulatory remedies and limits on the power of tech companies and technology, and while some of these may be worth pursuing, there’s also a danger that we politicize technology and undermine progress even as we seek to protect consumers and startups.

We’ve Never Had it so Good

First off, I’d argue that as consumers of personal technology we’ve never had it so good – the devices we have access to are unprecedented in both their raw power and in their specific capabilities, from cameras to connectivity to displays and audio. And the key thing here is that no single manufacturer either dominates sales or has far and away the best devices: one of the best things about the current state of the market is that consumers have a number of great options in key categories from smartphones to PCs to tablets and TVs. On the smartphone front, Apple and Samsung make the most and arguably the best premium smartphones, but new players like Google and Essential are creating promising new entrants, while the old guard including LG and others continue to produce interesting devices too. On key features like cameras, Apple, Samsung, Google and others all have great performance and it’s mostly a matter of personal preference rather than objectivity which is best.

In the smartphone market in particular, it’s also notable that consumers don’t have to spend the $700-plus that’s now required to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone in order to have a great experience. There are less powerful but still serviceable smartphones available at nearly every price point from $50 to $800, making this technology available to consumers throughout the world and thereby transforming lives and economies. All of this is also true in other categories like tablets and PCs, though low-end PCs still tend to prove the maxim that you get what you pay for more than other categories of consumer hardware.

Technology is an Enormous Force for Good

That last point is worth expanding upon: not only is our technology great, but it has done great good in the world, connecting people with each other and other resources as never before, opening up a world of information and content to anyone, anywhere, on the device of their choosing. The Internet has both allowed even the smallest publisher to reach massive audiences and allowed tiny interest groups to find comradeship across the globe. Technology is connecting families, giving opportunity to poor and otherwise marginalized populations, including the disabled and ethnic minorities.

But It Has Also Created Worrying Side Effects

None of that is to say that technology has created unalloyed good in the world. Many of the same enablers that have permitted innovation, positive communication, community building, and more to flourish have also fed conspirators of various stripes, trolls, and other bad actors and their ability to do nefarious work. Platforms designed to allow people to connect in positive ways have also enabled the spread of misinformation, harassment and abuse, and more recently even meddling in elections. It’s clear that we’re only beginning to discover the scope and potential of some of the negative effects of technology in our lives.

Meanwhile, tech as an industry is characterized by other unpleasant characteristics, notably a lack of diversity and a tendency to downplay or ignore the potential of new technologies for evil as well as good. Too often Silicon Valley demonstrates its lack of diversity in its lack of understanding of how its inventions will impact marginalized populations or even the population as a whole. Its self belief is one of its greatest strengths but also one of its greatest weaknesses. I’ve also pointed out that, with few exceptions, the largest companies in the industry are dominant and threaten to continue to squeeze out innovators.

Regulation is a Tempting Solution

In light of all this, voices from both sides of the political spectrum in the US and beyond are calling more loudly for regulation of big tech companies, whether on antitrust, content, advertising transparency, or other grounds. Some of these calls have obvious merit, and would bring the tech industry in line with older industries that provide similar functions. But my biggest worries with tech regulation are always that those writing the laws have an imperfect understanding of the market and that the process is so slow as to be ineffective in dealing with real problems while often creating unintended consequences. I’m also increasingly aware that in some of these debates a key constituency – media – has an inherent conflict of interest because it’s threatened by some of the very platforms it covers.

I’m hoping that we don’t see knee-jerk, often politically-motivated calls for regulation resulting in laws that would limit the ability of companies to innovate while not really solving the underlying problems. I have little faith that the current US political leadership will get anything meaningful done here without screwing it up, while the bigger threat to US tech currently comes from the EU and its efforts to punish big US tech companies for underpaying taxes and squeezing out local competitors.

A Promising Future

I’m inherently an optimist, and that optimism extends to the tech industry and the role of technology in our lives. I’m not naive enough to think that all the issues will merely go away, but on balance I think the positive benefits will be greater than the drawbacks, and humanity as a whole will continue to benefit enormously from the advances that will be made, especially in areas like healthcare, where consumer tech companies are just starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible. AI and machine learning bring their own threats and downsides, but I tend to think the more apocalyptic voices here are off the mark, while there could be significant benefits from smarter technology in our lives too.

This week’s Snap Inc earnings call was an indictment of the strategy pursued by the company in regard to both its core Snapchat app and its Spectacles hardware. The company has failed to drive two of the three major metrics that are key to success in the space, and it reversed its long-standing strategic stances on several key topics during a single earnings call. Having resisted calls for change for months, it appears Snap is now trying to change everything at once.

The Multiplier Key to Ad-Based App Growth

There’s a simple formula which is key to growing revenues for any ad-based online or app company:

user growth x engagement growth x rising ad prices

That’s the formula that’s served Facebook so enormously well over the last few years, and it’s also the one which Twitter and others have failed to implement effectively, with Snapchat seemingly the latest company to do so. Snapchat is executing on just one of these adequately – growing engagement and time spent – though it doesn’t consistently report the metrics needed to measure that progress over time. We do know that at the time Snap filed for its IPO, its users spent an average of 25-30 minutes per day in its app, and that number has grown since, but we don’t have any sense of the longer-term trajectory here.

On the other two metrics – user growth and rising ad prices – Snap has fallen woefully short. The user growth it saw in early 2016 was clearly something of a temporary phenomenon rather than a reliable predictor of future growth rates, though the company argued otherwise in its S-1 and clearly expected stronger growth than it’s actually seen since its IPO. Instead, what we’ve got is Twitter-like incrementalism rather than the strong growth that should characterize a social app in its prime:

The line across the chart hits at 10 million users per quarter, a milestone the company beat three times in late 2015 and early 2016, but hasn’t crossed again since, with the most recent quarter at just half that pace. That kind of user growth clearly isn’t going to get Snapchat where it needs to be from a revenue perspective.

Turning to prices per ad, we have no way to measure those directly, but it’s abundantly clear that they’ve been falling rather than rising as Snapchat has introduced programmatic ad buying. That change has lowered the entry point for advertising on Snapchat by three orders of magnitude, per management’s earnings call commentary, and demonstrated in the process that Snapchat’s earlier fixed rate cards were priced vastly above what supply and demand would have dictated. Now that advertisers have a choice in the matter, they’re paying vastly less, largely because there’s so little competition to fill those ad slots.

As such, instead of rapid user growth and rising engagement being multiplied by rising ad prices, Snap has seen revenues grow anemically, with average revenue per user in the US very low at around $2, and outside the US vanishingly small at under 50 cents in Europe and just 30 cents in the rest of the world. That won’t turn Snap into the kind of advertising powerhouse it clearly wants to be, and something needs to change.

The Dam Breaks

All of this has been fairly clear to those of us watching the company with keen eyes from the outside for some time – indeed, I pointed out the terrible timing of Snap’s IPO back in February, citing already apparent slow user growth. And yet within Snap there’s been a resistance to change, which I can only assume has its roots in CEO Evan Spiegel’s conviction that he’s a product genius. He’s been reported to resist data-based approaches to product management, instead favoring his own instincts, which have undeniably created a phenomenon but don’t seem to be serving Snap as well recently.

Now, it appears that the dam has finally broken, and rather than subtly embracing some of the changes that have been called for, Snap appears to be doing a 180 on almost every aspect of its strategy:

• Design – Snapchat has long been criticized for its unfriendly UI, while Snap’s management has defended it as part of its unique value proposition and argued that those who don’t get it aren’t its target users. Now, it appears poised for a major redesign, likely along the lines described here.
• Creators and celebrities – Snapchat has famously eschewed the courtship of creators and celebrities common to nearly every other big social platform, arguing that its organic tools were enough to attract and retain them. There’s been evidence for some time that this attitude was leading it to lose share among these groups (and their followers) to Instagram and other platforms. Now it appears that it will belatedly embrace them, though I’d argue it may well be too late for that.
• Curation/AI – Snapchat has also resisted the pull of AI-based curation of content, instead serving up a relatively small but relatively universal set of content to users in particular geographies, as a result of which it’s lacked the diversity of content and personalization found in other apps. It now appears ready to embrace this strategy too, though it acknowledges the risks inherent in moving away from the relatively confined form of content sharing it’s focused on to date.
• Pursuing other demographics – Snapchat had for a long time prioritized its iOS apps because that’s where it saw the highest user engagement, something it acknowledged in its S-1 filing. It has belatedly embraced Android, and after months of small tweaks to its Android app is now apparently working on an overhauled version that should fix some of the issues it’s had until now. It’s also trying to broaden the scope of its audience beyond the teenaged and young adult audiences it’s dominated in the past, but that also brings inherent risks as it invites the parents of its current users into what’s felt like an intimate and separate space.
• Spectacles – Snapchat launched its first hardware product late last year, seemingly out of nowhere, with a clever marketing strategy that focused on artificial scarcity. However, management seemed to completely misinterpret the early sales of the device and ordered way too many units, leading to a write-down of inventory that’s twice the size of its revenue from Spectacles in its first three quarters on sale. This feels like yet another example of gut winning out over data.

The big question is whether any or all of this will actually help to turn around the two metrics where Snap is currently failing, without damaging the one metric – engagement – where it’s been succeeding. I’m certainly skeptical, especially in the context of ongoing inroads by Instagram and others into Snapchat’s once unique mindshare among younger people. The biggest risk is that Snapchat damages the current user experience as it pursues these new features and the users they’re designed to attract, eroding its core strategic advantage: its penetration of its core demographic.

This week has seen both Congressional hearings on the issue of Russian use of tech platforms to influence US politics and a quarterly financial report from Facebook which made that meddling a theme. There was a stark contrast between the relatively defensive attitude on display in the hearings and the more contrite and proactive approach indicated by Facebook’s earnings call. The social networking company seems far more willing so far than others to put real money behind its efforts to ensure undue political influence is curbed, for better or worse.

Political Fallout Remains Unclear

This week’s hearings were certainly uncomfortable for the representatives (mostly lawyers) sent by the big tech companies to testify in front of Congressional committees. They were on the receiving end of frustrated chastisement from lawmakers, and though they defended and dodged as best they could, they still likely came away licking their wounds. But it’s still far from clear what if any action Congress might take as a result of these hearings – the threats have been general and fairly vague rather than specific enough to warrant real concern on the part of the tech companies.

Certainly, none of those tech companies should consider itself immune from political fallout given the growing unease about their role from both the political right (over perceived bias) and the left (over antitrust and related issues). But for now they may well escape any concrete attempts at additional regulation given their commitments to increased transparency and reporting around political advertising and the like.

Facebook’s Response Stands Out

Though the attitude demonstrated by Facebook in the hearings wasn’t markedly different from that of its peers, its earnings call on Wednesday certainly stood out from the others held by the tech companies appearing before Congress this week. Whereas the others have largely downplayed the financial impact of the current political quagmire in which they find themselves stuck, Facebook’s leadership made a proactive commitment to trying to solve the problem: it committed to spending enough additional money on “security” in the coming months to have a material impact on its profitability going forward.

What’s interesting here is that there is no immediate pressure on Facebook to take these steps, and the decision to take them seems motivated as much by Mark Zuckerberg’s recent conversion to a more responsible and community-centric strategy for Facebook as by any political imperative. The CEO has been through such an abrupt about-face on the issue of Facebook’s role in political meddling over the past year that it’s almost as if he’s a different person from the one who reacted dismissively to suggestions fake news on his platform might have played a role in the outcome of the 2016 elections.

That community-orientedness was evident not only in the security commitments but also in Zuckerberg’s comments on Wednesday’s call about making interaction on Facebook more meaningful – an attempt to return to the company’s roots as a social network rather than the content hub it’s become in recent years. And of course all of this builds on the company’s new mission announced earlier this year to focus on community building and bringing people closer together.

People and Technology but no Change in Business Model

Facebook’s approach to solving what it frames as the security issue involves both people and technology: Facebook will double its ten thousand strong moderation team (many of them likely outside contractors) in the coming year, but will also continue to apply its AI and machine learning skills to the challenge. The cost of additional employees and contractors will therefore have by far the biggest financial impact on the company.

But one thing the company is notably not proposing to do is change its business model, which is interesting because it’s that business model that’s been at the root of the company’s problems with regard to political interference. Making its platforms far less open, and its algorithms more tightly controlled would certainly do a great deal to mitigate election meddling, but it would also have a massive effect on its top line, which continues to grow rapidly despite its dire warnings over the past year of coming slowdowns.

Facebook says that the investments it will make will precede the improvements to the user experience and therefore healthier user and revenue growth in the longer term, but that the latter will come eventually. However, there’s a real risk that all the dollars it spends on neutralizing political criticism with stronger moderation and smarter AI don’t really solve these business model-driven problems and leave it both poorer and in the same place politically as it is now, while big competitors like Google and Twitter try to ride out the political turmoil without making such drastic changes.

Facebook is here putting its investors’ money where Mark Zuckerberg’s mouth is – there was a palpable sense of disappointment at the financial commitment being made here among financial analysts on its earnings call, though also some acknowledgment that the moves might be necessary. The risk here will be borne by those investors, while the upside is still far from clear, and the real motivation seems to be a personal desire from Zuckerberg to feel better about the role his platform plays in the world. The next few months may alternatively demonstrate his wisdom in taking these bold steps or reveal them to be misguided and expensive.

This week saw one of the newest entrants in the US smartphone market, Andy Rubin’s Essential, drop its price by $200 from $699 to $499, undoubtedly a response to poor early sales. We’ve also recently seen the debut of the second generation of Google’s Pixel smartphone line, after a first year in which one of the biggest names in consumer technology was unable to shift more than a couple million of its flagship devices. Why is it so tough for even seemingly high-quality smartphones to break into the US market?

Carriers Dominate Sales

The first obvious answer is that the major wireless carriers dominate smartphone sales in the US, and that’s especially true when it comes to premium smartphones, which are predominantly attached to carriers’s postpaid wireless plans. Well over 70% of overall US smartphone sales go through the carriers, and in postpaid that’s likely even higher. Even when sales go through third party retailers like Best Buy, they’re often selected from the limited range of devices stocked by the carriers anyway, so the same effects apply.

That matters because the carriers stock a very limited number of brands on their shelves. For the most part, that means stocking Apple, Samsung, and LG phones essentially across the board, with limited support for other brands at each individual carrier. You might find the occasional BlackBerry, Kyocera, HTC, Motorola, or ZTE device, but shelves in your local store will be dominated by the three big brands. Carriers have little incentive to take risks on the smaller brands when the vast majority of demand is for the big three anyway, especially when the smaller brands offer little positive differentiation. As such, they’re often used to fill small niches but rarely to flesh out a high-end portfolio.

The Big Brands Dominate Share

Partly as a result of the carriers’ limited support for other brands, but in large part also because people have now established preferences and habits which make it hard to get them to switch, the big brands dominate market share. Counterpoint Research estimates that 75% of sales in Q2 were of phones from the three big brands, and 86% from four brands, including ZTE, which is strong in the prepaid segment. At three of the carriers, the big three account for over 80% of sales, and again on the postpaid side alone the dominance would be even more complete.

The reality is that the vast majority of customers are limited in the options they have available, and fairly happy with those options, providing few incentives for them to choose new offerings, or for the carriers to Mae them available.

Exclusives Remain Attractive but Ultimately Fruitless

One of the few ways to break through the carrier resistance to the new is to offer exclusives for attractive new phones, thereby giving the carriers incentives to range a phone in hopes of winning customers. We’ve seen this happen with both the Essential Phone and both generations of Pixels now, with Sprint getting the exclusive on the former and Verizon the exclusive on the latter.

Neither, though, appears to have served either the carriers or their device partners well – both devices have sold poorly despite strong promotional activity from the mobile operators, and both have also shut themselves off from the benefits of being sold by all the major carriers, which every major device vendor has long enjoyed. I’ve written previously about the dubious merits of this strategy for Google, which surely doesn’t need the brand recognition extra promotional activity provides.

AT&T and Nokia long ago proved that exclusives can’t overcome the fundamental resistance to change in the market, and these new entrants should give up on the strategy too. At least the Pixels have the advantage of being sold by the largest of the US postpaid operators, while the poor Essential Phone is stuck on the smallest and weakest of the big four.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Both Google and Essential will be hoping that they can change minds in time, even if their early efforts have been fairly fruitless. And there’s some evidence from other brands that a long-term strategy can pay off, though the starting point should likely be somewhere other than premium smartphones. ZTE and TCL-Alcatel have long proven that there is room in the market for low-priced brands targeting the prepaid segment, while Blu has been successful in selling prepaid phones direct to consumers rather than going through carriers.

ZTE’s persistence in particular over the course of many years has finally earned it a slot on a carrier’s postpaid roster for the first time, albeit with what’s likely to be a marginal phone, the Axon M, in AT&T’s portfolio. There is no real precedent, though, for a premium brand to break in by means of this strategy. Brands have instead had to start at the bottom and work their way up – a strategy that arguably worked for Samsung in several markets in the past too. That doesn’t bode well for Essential or Google, though both are deep-pocketed enough to continue to pursue the harder path to success for several more years if they choose to do so.

Samsung is holding its annual Developer Conference this week in San Francisco. At the day one keynote on Wednesday, it pushed a vision centered on “Connected Thinking” as its major theme for not only the conference but its strategy in relation to its software and services in the coming year. That was reflected in a range of moves designed to bring what have been disparate parts of Samsung together, but it’s apparent that this will be a tall order.

A Single Cloud Platform and Bixby as Connective Tissue

Samsung’s major announcements focused on three key topics:

• Consolidating Samsung’s disparate Internet of Things cloud offerings
• Iterating on Bixby, by improving the technology, extending it to new devices, and opening it up more
• Going all-in with Google on AR through ARCore support on all of this year’s flagship phones.

The Internet of Things moves are focused mostly on using the SmartThings brand (now without Samsung as an umbrella brand) as the consumer lead, while consolidating three separate cloud IoT platforms into one, also now tagged with the SmartThings brand. ARTIK survives as a separate IoT brand, but now focused mainly on modules, while its cloud platform along with the Samsung Connect Cloud announced earlier this year will be folded into the SmartThings Cloud.

The way I see this is that the SmartThings Cloud will be the invisible connective tissue on the back end, while Bixby 2.0 eventually becomes the visible connective tissue in the front end as part of a much more coherent and connected vision for Samsung’s range of devices. Samsung executives pointed out during the keynote that it has arguably the largest number and range of devices in use of any company in the world, but the reality is that it’s always been a pretty disparate range of devices, with only fairly superficial integration between them. A big reason for that is Samsung’s operational structure, which has separate CEOs for each product-centric business unit.

The vision Samsung is pushing now is one where a variety of services on these devices will all be powered by the same cloud back-end, and Bixby will become a cloud-based voice interface which works on more and more of them over time. Bixby 2.0 will shift its personalization and training from the device to the cloud, and will therefore start to build profiles of individual users which can be exposed on a variety of devices, including shared devices like TVs and fridges. In addition to its own devices, it’s going to try to extend Bixby support to a variety of third party devices through modules and dongles as part of what it called Project Ambience, which will Bixby-enable existing home devices, both smart and dumb ones, and connect them to each other.

Significant Challenges Lie Ahead

What’s interesting here is that, even though Samsung controls the operating systems on several of its devices, because it doesn’t control by far the biggest – Android on its smartphones – it is instead building the connective layer between its various devices at the interface level. That means pushing Bixby to become far more than it’s been so far, acting not only as a way to perform tasks previously done through touch on a phone, but increasingly allowing for integration with other Samsung devices like TVs and control of smart home gear through SmartThings integrations.

In reality, though, voice can’t be the only interface and therefore can’t be the only connective layer between these various devices – in time, the integration therefore either needs to grow beyond Bixby, or Bixby itself needs to evolve to the point where it’s more than just a voice interface. In the meantime, the SmartThings brand, now decoupled from the Samsung brand to foster a sense of openness, will nonetheless become the brand for Samsung’s own connected home ecosystem too (replacing Samsung Connect), which may cause some customer confusion.

But those aren’t the only barriers to making this vision work: Samsung needs to overcome both internal and external hurdles if it’s to be successful in creating a truly connected ecosystem. The biggest internal barriers continue to be structural – hearing Samsung executives talk about this week’s announcements both on stage and one-on-one, the language is still far more that of separate companies “partnering” rather than a single team working together. The integration announced this week represents progress, but there’s a long way still go go and huge cultural barriers to overcome.

Externally, Samsung needs to convince developers and hardware partners that Bixby is ready for use as a voice platform beyond its smartphones, at a time when it’s got big shortcomings even there. Deeper integration of the Viv technology will certainly help to improve its functionality, as will opening up version two earlier to developers so that the integration can be deeper when it launches to consumers. But the leap Samsung is contemplating here is a huge one, one which other platforms have approached much more gradually and incrementally than Samsung is proposing to do. Samsung would arguably be better served by tackling either third party integration or cross-device support first and then pursuing the other second, rather than trying to do it all at once. The current approach risks over-promising and under-delivering.

The last big challenge is one of adoption – unlike earlier voice assistants, Samsung can’t simply add Bixby to existing hardware, because little of it was designed with voice interfaces in mind. What that means is that it can only grow the Bixby base to the extent that it can grow the base of devices which offer it. In categories like TVs and fridges, that means waiting until next year to even start selling them, and with long refresh cycles, it’ll take many years before penetration is meaningful. Even in smartphones, where Samsung has an installed base of hundreds of millions, it has just 10 million users of Bixby, and we don’t even know how many of those use it daily or weekly. Even if the new SmartThings and Bixby ecosystems work exactly as intended, it will be quite some time before any significant number of consumers actually get to benefit from them.

Google’s announcement of its second generation of first-party hardware made clear something that’s been increasingly apparent over the past year: the company is very serious about this business. However, it also reinforced what continues to be a strange paradox: Google doesn’t actually seem to be very serious about selling at least some of that hardware, namely phones.

Another Solid Set of Hardware

Google’s first set of hardware was announced a year ago this week, and was already an impressive start. The Pixel phones were a decent pair of devices with some clever features, good cameras, and exclusive access – at least temporarily – to the Google Assistant which was then just launching. The Google Home was a prettier and in some ways more powerful answer to the Amazon Echo, at a lower price. Daydream VR was a prettier and more usable answer to the Samsung Gear VR. And Google WiFi leaned on Google’s partnership with a couple of traditional WiFi router vendors to create the first mesh WiFi system from a big brand. All told, the hardware released was solid, attractive, and competitive in its various markets.

This year’s hardware builds nicely on last year’s, with refreshed Pixel phones, two new Google Home devices either side of the first in the lineup, and new entrants in several other categories too. The new Pixel phones look like good upgrades on last year’s, and offer some interesting new features while not embracing some of this year’s big trends either entirely or at all. The new Google Home devices will help Google compete more effectively with the low end of Amazon’s lineup while also targeting a part of the market Apple had looked like having to itself. The Pixelbook laptop is as baffling a product as the first Pixel was – a premium device in a category notable mostly for its low prices. Google’s two new categories are wireless earbuds, where its PixelBuds serve as BeatsX competitors at an AirPods price point with a unique AI-based twist, and Google Clips seeks to create a new category which took a somewhat unwarranted chunk out of GoPro’s share price yesterday.

Again, all told this looks like a solid lineup. Google’s recent HTC deal, the fact that it’s updated and broadened the hardware line, and its ongoing public statements all confirm that it’s really serious about making its own hardware, offering a coherent set of products, and driving the same integration and optimization benefits as other integrated vendors have done before.

A Unique and Somewhat Puzzling Approach to Hardware

Google continues to approach the hardware categories it enters in a unique way, however. It downplays the role of hardware itself while playing up the role of software, clearly playing to its strengths as first and foremost a software company, and one which has had little control until now over the details of its hardware design in phones in particular. It’s the argument we would expect Google to make, and it’s clearly capable of achieving in software what others pursue through hardware, which is impressive.

Some of Google’s offerings also feel experimental, and the AI features in both the PixelBuds and Clips seem like good examples of that. Real-time translation and the idea of a camera that automatically takes the shots you want are both impressive demonstrations of Google’s AI chops, but neither is a product people are clamoring for, nor are the features ones people are actually likely to use regularly. How often do you need real-time language translation? And how likely is it that both you and your conversation partner will have the necessary hardware and software to make it happen? Google is honest about the fact that it doesn’t expect Google Clips to be a big seller, and that’s a good thing – creating new hardware categories is tough for anyone, but especially for companies without a significant presence or history in the space.

Given that ChromeOS has actually done pretty well in the segments where it feels relevant, while Android Wear continues to languish, some of Google’s choices about where to pursue a first party hardware strategy seem a little puzzling. Why not show the Android OEMs how to make a decent smartwatch, rather than ceding much of the market to two platforms – Apple’s and Samsung’s – it doesn’t control? Why pursue premium Chromebooks instead? Showcasing both Android apps and Google Assistant on a Chromebook would be just as possible at $500 as at $1000 if that’s the intention here.

Marketing Continues to be the Biggest Challenge

Above all, though, it feels like marketing continues to be Google’s biggest challenge when it comes to smartphones in particular. The products are there, but Google’s approach to the other 4 P’s of marketing continues to be lacking:

• Price – last year Google matched iPhone pricing exactly, but this year it has a $200 price differential between phones which it explicitly said don’t have any feature differences, in a market where $100 size differentials have become the norm. That makes the Pixel 2 XL more expensive than Apple’s base iPhone 8 Plus, which seems an odd decision.
• Promotion – as with pricing, much of Google’s marketing last year seemed aimed directly at the iPhone, not surprising from a company which doesn’t want to be seen to undermine its OEM partners. And yet all the evidence suggests that people tend to be fairly loyal to the two big ecosystems, and there’s relatively little switching from iOS to Android. Everyone else knows that Pixels are for Google-centric people, and Google needs to embrace that in its marketing rather than making sarcastic digs at the iPhone. Its advertising should be about what its phones do uniquely well for people who love Google and its services, because that’s the niche it’s really going after.
• People and Placement – ever since the launch of the first Android phone, Google has underestimated the role of people in selling and supporting phones, and that still doesn’t seem to have changed. Its own channel is exclusively online, and it really hasn’t invested in the kind of third party retail presence necessary to effectively market a phone. But from a US perspective in particular the biggest stumble Google has made continues to be its exclusive relationship with Verizon on the carrier side. Carriers are by far the biggest channel for smartphone sales in the US, and limiting itself to one carrier – generally not the one seen as the most forward looking either – has been a huge mistake, one Google has repeated this year. (Indeed, I was told today that the Google-Verizon exclusive is a three-year deal, and if that’s true it means Google can’t extricate itself from this mess anytime soon.)

All of this adds up to a bizarre picture of a Google which is enormously serious about building the best possible hardware, but doesn’t seem very serious at all about actually selling it. Given the scale of both its organic investment in the Pixel line and now its billion-dollar-plus HTC deal, Google is pouring massive resources into this project, but it will never see a reasonable return unless these devices sell. It’s unclear to me whether this is a deliberate strategy on Google’s part to limit the negative impact on its hardware partners, or the result of organizational schizophrenia, but it simply doesn’t make sense. Either Google is serious about this market or it isn’t, and if it is it needs to bite the bullet and go ahead and compete with its OEM partners more directly. If that pushes them to do better, that’s good for Google too, and if it doesn’t Google gets a greater share of the premium Android smartphone market and gets to put its own services front and center. At this point, there’s no viable alternative to Android for independent phone makers, so there’s little if any risk to the strategy.

Amazon on Wednesday held an event to update and expand its Echo lineup, and in the process demonstrated how the product line is maturing. There are more products, but they’re also more clearly targeted at specific segments of the market, while still undercutting pretty much all major competitors on price. Amazon clearly isn’t ready to cede the market to Google, Apple, or anyone else likely to enter in the near future.

Increasing Segmentation in the Echo Lineup

The first thing to note about the new Echo lineup is the increasing segmentation of the market. Though I’ve seen some reacting to Amazon’s new lineup as if it’s essentially random and experimental, I think there’s a lot more structure to it than it might at first seem. The illustration below lays out Amazon’s Echo product line before and after this week’s announcements:

Before this week’s announcements, the Echo portfolio looked like a bit of a hodgepodge, with two specialty devices, one device with a screen, and one cheap and one relatively expensive straight voice speaker. After this week’s announcements, the picture is a lot clearer, especially in the first two columns in the chart above:

• A good, better, best lineup in the core voice speaker space, with list prices at $50 intervals and likely discounts to even more competitive prices. The core Echo is now also $50 cheaper, significantly better looking (and with more design options), and with better audio.
• A two-size lineup in the currently much smaller (and pricier) speaker-with-a-screen segment, doing to that segment what the Dot has long done in the core voice speaker space and offering the videoconferencing and other video benefits in a smaller device, likely for secondary rooms in the home
• There remain two specialty devices, one for fashionistas and the other for those that want to take Echo-like functionality on the go, which will likely continue to account for a very small proportion of sales
• There are now also two accessories, which expand the addressable market and activities associated with the Echo line, into voice calling using a landline and family gaming.

At this point, the vast majority of customers will mix and match products based on how much they care about audio quality and video, in a variety of rooms in the home, using Dots for secondary spaces and Echo or Echo Plus units in primary spaces, with the occasional device with a screen for customers who care about video conferencing or another endpoint for Prime video.

Addressing a Broader Market

The range of activities enabled by the Echo line has been expanded mostly through software since the original launch, but over the last few months Amazon has added considerable specialization through hardware too, from the screens and cameras on the Show/Spot and Look to the smart home hub in the new Echo Plus to the accessories.

By addressing a wider set of use cases, Amazon is clearly looking to expand the market for which Echo devices will be attractive beyond those looking for voice-driven kitchen timers, user-friendly but low-quality and unattractive speakers for music, or an alternative to turning on the radio in the morning. As such, these devices start to compete indirectly with more products which would previously have set in fundamentally different categories, including game-centric TV boxes like the Apple TV, VoIP services and devices, smart home hubs like those from SmartThings and others, and so on.

Amazon’s ambitions with the Echo have always been broad, but they’ve been achieved largely by taking on a new, voice-driven interface with the limited set of tasks that are well suited to voice control through a device with finite capabilities. Its broader ambitions are now more easily realized as it leverages its early dominance in voice speakers into these new market segments, and I would expect it to take a greater share of the segments of the market it addresses in the coming year than in the past year, despite Google’s likely introduction of a Dot competitor next week.

The High End is Still Up for Grabs

That last sentence, though, raises the question of what will happen in the segments of the market Amazon doesn’t address with its first party lineup, especially the high end market. That market doesn’t really exist today for voice speakers specifically, and is mostly limited to standalone speakers from premium audio companies and Sonos, which will hold its own event next week, one that’s widely expected to feature voice as a major new feature.

Apple, of course, will also shortly enter the market at the high end, emphasizing many of the same historical strengths that have driven Sonos’s dominance of the mid-tier whole-home audio market: quality, ease of use, and a focus on music. Amazon still seems relatively uninterested in going after the premium part of the market, in part because that’s a strategy for those who want to drive high margins from their hardware rather than for those who are using voice speakers as a loss leader for building a voice ecosystem. Both Amazon and Google seem likely to try to address that premium end of the market mostly through partners, though Amazon has moved ever so slightly into higher quality audio in recent months. Google is reportedly working on a higher-end Home speaker, but we’ll have to see whether that actually launches and where in the market it’s pitched.

The diagram below indicates how I see this market playing out over the next few months, with Sonos and Apple both entering towards the premium end of the market, but Apple likely pricing above Sonos based on the pricing of Sonos’ current lineup:

Amazon doesn’t have a strong incentive to pursue the premium part of the market for today, while Google’s participation in that part of the market is still theoretical at this point. That means that we may well see the same dynamic playing out in voice speakers which we’ve seen in smartphones, tablets, and even connected TV boxes, with Apple capturing the small but highly profitable premium segment while Google (and in this case Amazon) captures the lower-margin mass market. Given that there’s likely to be close alignment between those who already favor Apple’s devices in those other categories and those who will prefer the premium approach in the voice speaker market, that likely won’t present problems for Apple’s ecosystem. Sonos, meanwhile, may find itself squeezed between increasingly high-quality voice speakers from Amazon and Google (and their partners) and Apple’s HomePod, and will have to ensure that it’s unique value proposition around multi-room audio really stands out in that mid market.

Nest this week make its biggest ever announcements and introduced its first truly new hardware category since it acquired Dropcam in 2014. Its product line is now extensive and with partner devices thrown into the mix covers much of the addressable smart home market, with all of its own products overhauled in some fashion in the past year. But one thing remains stubbornly unchanged at Nest: its business model. And that may now be the biggest thing holding it back.

An Explosion in Activity After Years of Minor Change

The past year has seen an explosion in activity from Nest after years of relatively minor change and incremental updates. The picture below illustrates what’s happened to Nest’s portfolio of products since its inception, and it’s clear how different 2017 has been:

From its inception in 2011 with the original smart thermostat through the acquisition by Google and acquisition of Dropcam shortly thereafter, Nest created or acquired three main product lines, and from 2014 to 2016 that didn’t change. The Dropcam products adopted Nest branding and got some updates and new variants, but there was no dramatic change. Then, in 2017, the cameras got big updates with much smarter technology, Nest introduced its first cheaper (and less obtrusive) thermostat, and this week it announced its first doorbell product and a home security system. All of this came after the ouster of founder Tony Fadell and although that’s likely in part a coincidence, it’s notable how much more quickly the company has appeared to be moving in the past year.

But the Business Model Remains the Same

However, for all the new products announced over the past year, Nest’s business model remains the same: this is fundamentally an off-the-shelf, pay-upfront, do-it-yourself model, the same as it’s been since the beginning. And as I’ve argued before, that model has severe limitations in terms of its addressable market. Just consider the prices of Nest’s top of the line products:

• Nest Cam IQ outdoor: $349
• Nest Cam IQ indoor: $299
• Nest Secure: starts at $499
• Nest Smart Thermostat: $249.

Several of these products will need to come in multiples to be useful, so those prices should likely be multiplied to get a real sense of what they’ll cost. That alone will make them cost prohibitive for many customers, but add in the intimidation factor of fiddling with thermostat wiring and the attendant risk of electric shock, drilling through walls to install a security camera, or trying to troubleshoot devices that won’t maintain a reliable connection to WiFi, and you further limit the addressable market.

The (DIY) Smart Home is Stuck

That’s why I’ve been arguing for quite some time now that the biggest thing the smart home market needs to go mainstream is a service model in which professionals install and manage the system and charge a monthly fee which recoups the cost of the hardware rather than charging for it upfront. That lowers the price barrier to entry considerably and means that those not willing or able to install or manage devices themselves can still participate in the smart home.

When new CEO Marwan Fawaz took over from Fadell, I posited that his background at Motorola and other companies which worked through carriers to support a service model might mean that we’d see more of this kind of thing from Nest going forward. But although Nest devices are included in some third party smart home services, Nest still hasn’t created its own, in contrast to players like Comcast, Vivint, AT&T, or the alarm companies. Indeed, at this week’s event it used the self-install model as a major selling point in contrast to having to wait around for a technician to come and spend hours installing a system. That may well be a selling point for the minority who feel comfortable with that model, but I worry that Nest is shutting itself off from a much larger addressable market by restricting itself to it.

A Foundation is in Place for a Managed Service

Nest already has a foundation in place for a services model, as it offers the Nest Aware service for monitoring cameras, and now has a partnership with Moni for 24/7 monitoring around its security system. It’s building a subscription model, but it’s entirely based on either third parties or automated systems today rather than incorporating the human touch in installation and management. Nest even offers to help you find an installer for your new Nest products, but that’s still an arm’s length relationship today and doesn’t offer the brand guarantee that could come from a truly integrated service.

To be sure, there’s still likely quite a bit of growth available for Nest in its current model, by expanding it to new markets and now expanding the line of products it sells. For now, that may be enough to sustain its business for the next couple of years, but there’s a much bigger opportunity out there if it takes many of the components it already has in place and turns them into a managed service.

With the launch of new iPhones this week, and specifically the creation of a fourth tier in the current generation lineup, I’ve been talking to people over the last couple of days about price quite a bit, and thinking about average selling prices for iPhones, and how Apple has been able to raise ASPs even as it’s extended the iPhone lineup down market, which is a pretty unusual feat.

A brief history of iPhone pricing

A good place to start this analysis is with a brief review of the last few years’ iPhone lineup and the price range implied by it, as well as the average selling prices that resulted from it. The diagram below shows how the iPhone lineup has expanded over the last few years from a single current model to four (ignoring the fact that older models have stuck around at discounted prices as well):

That expansion in the range largely reflects the maturation of the market – when markets are in their infancy, product lines can be simple because there’s plenty of addressable market to go around, but as they mature and become increasingly saturated, diversification in the product line becomes necessary to meet a wider range of use cases for increasingly sophisticated buyers. It was also clearly in part a response to competitive moves to offer larger phones in the case of the Plus line.

The chart below shows what’s happened to the price range and average selling prices as a result (in each case, the year refers to the year in which products were launched, with the ASP being the average price per shipment during the four quarters from launch). In this case, the lowest price available does include older phones sold at discounted prices, and I’ve included a pretty modest guesstimate for this year’s ASP, which could well be quite a bit higher depending on supply levels for the iPhone X.

The price range from the very cheapest iPhone being sold to the most expensive model has obviously expanded significantly, from just $200 in 2010 to $800 once the iPhone X launches, with the iPhone SE dropping to $350. That reflects the broadening range of iPhones available, as well as the increasingly large storage tiers the various lines offer.

Remarkably strong ASPs throughout

But to my mind the most interesting thing to look at is what’s happened to ASPs, because the pattern in Apple’s other three big product lines – Mac, iPod, and iPad – has been that as the product has matured and Apple has spread the lineup down market, ASPs have fallen, sometimes very significantly. Mac ASPs in the late 1990s were well over $2000, but have dropped by around half in 20 years even ignoring inflation during that period. iPods sold for an average of over $400 when they first launched, but dropped to an ASP of near $150 in the ensuing ten year period, while iPad ASPs have dropped from over $600 to closer to $400.

The iPhone is therefore a massive outlier even among Apple’s own product lines, with an ASP that has held constant or risen for much of the last ten years. Apple has changed the way it reports iPhone revenues since its inception, which makes it impossible to make true comparisons between early ASPs and those today, but as the chart above shows, ASPs have risen over the last seven years at least even as the lowest available price has fallen by $200. In other words, though Apple has reduced the lowest price of iPhones by nearly half since its inception, people are choosing to spend more and not less over time, even as the market for iPhones has expanded dramatically beyond the US and other mature and high income markets. In other words, that expansion in ASP has happened in spite of many sales of cheaper, older phones in less wealthy markets around the world. The big question is therefore why, and what’s different about the iPhone?

Marketing, business models, and the centrality of the smartphone

I’d argue there are three key reasons for the behavior of iPhone ASPs. The first is marketing, the second is business and sales models for the iPhone, and the third is the increasing centrality of iPhones in our lives. Starting with marketing, I don’t think we can overlook Apple’s successful marketing of new iPhones each year as big improvements over the last year’s phones and especially over those from two years before, given that the two-year upgrade cycle was for many years the default. Apple has convinced people to buy a top of the line iPhone roughly every two to three years very consistently, and the reality is that the price of the top of the line iPhone has risen significantly during that period without much evidence of price elasticity in mature markets at least. That’s a testament to Apple’s product management, positioning, and promotion of its new devices.

Secondly, the business and sales model for selling smartphones in many markets is a huge factor here too. There’s really no other major consumer electronics category where the default sales model in many markets is to pay for it in monthly installments rather than upfront. There are certainly financing models in other markets, but nowhere is the installment or leasing model as ubiquitous as with smartphones. That model has helped the iPhone enormously, as one of the more expensive smartphones on the market, because consumers are not exposed as directly to the price increases they’ve faced over the years. Without the wireless carriers and their subsidy and installment models, I’m very skeptical the iPhone would have seen the iPhone performance it has.

Thirdly, the willingness of consumers to pay more and more for their iPhones is a testament to the increasing centrality of smartphones to our lives and the role these devices now play for us. In many cases, they’re partial or complete replacements for personal computers, used for managing calendars, writing emails, online shopping, paying bills, and so on. Many of us run businesses in part or entirely from our smartphones. And so these devices have taken on enormous significance for us and we’re willing to pay more to get bigger screens, faster processors, and other features which reflect their centrality in our lives.

My bet is that we’ll see significant demand for the iPhone X this year, and if Apple is able to meet that demand with significant supply later in 2017 and into 2018, ASPs could again rise quite significantly. That would be a testament to these same three factors: great marketing by Apple, the enabling business and sales models for smartphones, and a recognition by consumers that these are some of the most important devices in their lives.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple releasing a $1,000 iPhone next week, and a lot of pushback from financial analysts in particular on the idea that people would actually buy such a thing. Carolina shared some data yesterday from a recent survey about people’s attitudes towards buying a higher-priced iPhone, which showed a mixed picture at best. But the reality is that talking about a phone in these terms is a bit old-fashioned at this point regardless of the actual price, especially in a US context.

Installment Plans and Leasing are Now the Norm

In the US, the vast majority of premium smartphones are sold through the major wireless carriers, with the largest four being AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless. Each of those companies has been through a transition over the past few years away from the traditional subsidy model, under which customers paid a portion of the price of a phone up front, to a combination of installment and leasing models, where the cost of the phone is broken up into monthly payments. The exact percentage of sales off the old subsidy model varies by carrier, but all four are now above 75% with several over 80%. This is how people buy phones now in the US, and it’s not about the full retail price.

Further, the new model gives the carriers quite a bit of flexibility with regard to how they actually set the monthly payments, because they can be spread over a variety of different time periods and discounted (and, yes, subsidized) in various ways to attract customers, especially in the context of a hot new phone. So a leasing plan from Sprint might have a very different monthly price from an installment plan from Verizon even for the exact same phone. But all of that will be expressed in the form of monthly payments and not a full retail price.

The Samsung Note8 Launch Gives Us a Sneak Preview

The recent Samsung Note8 launch gives us something of a sneak peak at how a $900-1000 phone actually gets priced and sold in the US market. Here’s a sampling of prices from the major US carriers:

• AT&T: full retail price: $949; monthly price: $31.67 for a 30-month installment plan with option to trade in after 2 years; $39.59 to trade in after one year
• Sprint: full retail price: $960; monthly price: normally $40 but currently $20 as part of a special offer, for a lease with option to trade in after a year
• T-Mobile: full retail price: $930; monthly price: $210 up front and $30 per month over a 24-month term, with an offer to buy one and get one free during preorders
• Verizon Wireless: full retail price: $960; monthly price: $40 for two years.

Compare that to current monthly prices for the base model iPhone 7 Plus, a phone that costs roughly $200 less to buy outright, which run from $25 to $36, and you’ll see that the real difference in price between a $770 phone and a $1000 phone isn’t $230 for most customers but a monthly price difference of anything from zero to $15. On top of that, bear in mind that the new iPhones are likely to be the biggest carrier switching event the US market has seen since 2014, so we’re going to see a lot of discounts, offers, and other promotions which lower the effective price even further.

So really any survey that asks about a thousand dollar iPhone is asking the wrong question: the real question is whether customers are willing to pay a little extra (or perhaps none at all) for a great new phone. Which is why Phil Schiller showed this slide during the iPhone pricing segment of last year’s event:

This is the framing you can expect to see from Apple next week: affordable-looking monthly pricing, with the new phone probably coming in at around $40, or $8-10 more than the iPhone 7 Plus. And that’s going to be a lot more palatable than the “$1000 iPhone” headlines will lead people to believe.

One Last Note on iPhone Pricing Surveys

One last thing that’s also worth mentioning is the very nature of surveys that ask about theoretical prices for as-yet unreleased devices: they’re historically terrible as predictors of what people will actually pay in the real world for devices they have seen. Ask someone whether they’ll pay $1000 for a new iPhone they in many cases know nothing about (and might reasonably assume will be an on-par successor to the current iPhone lineup) is always going to lead to unrealistic responses. But ask them next week whether they’ll pay a few bucks extra per month for the iPhone Apple just announced with all its usual fanfare, whiz-bang demos, and so on and you’ll get a very different answer that’s likely a lot closer to what we’ll actually see in stores. Now it’s just up to Apple to sell us all on that device on stage next Tuesday.

High-end, mainstream virtual reality is coming up on eighteen months in the consumer market at this point, with the launches of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive early last year and the PlayStation VR in late 2016. Around the time of the first launches, I wrote a piece here about the emerging spread of VR products that existed at that time in two fairly distinct camps separated by quite different pricing, with the higher-end rigs mostly $400-800 on top of either a high-end PC or a console, and mobile VR down at the $100 price point or below. Microsoft and others clearly saw an opportunity in that market to create lower-cost but still powerful VR rigs in-between those two price buckets around that time. But the market has now moved on quite a bit, with recent price reductions squeezing the middle and leaving little room for differentiation where there was once a clear market opportunity.

At the time Microsoft launched its intentions around what it called Windows Mixed Reality headsets late last year, the VR market looked about like this:

There were two distinct markets at the high end and the low end, and an opportunity at around something like $300 to create a powerful and yet more affordable alternative to the premium PC-based rigs and to some extent Sony’s console-based setup. Microsoft consequently announced that it would have headsets in that price range available through partners based on its Windows Mixed Reality platform sometime this year, and we’re now starting to see those devices announced and available to the public, including at IFA this week.

And yet a lot has changed in the months since Microsoft first outlined its vision, notably the prices of those high-end rigs. At the time those mixed reality devices are actually launching, the market looks more like this:

Whereas Oculus Rift’s bundle and the HTC Vive both started at $800 early last year, in recent months those prices have fallen quite a bit, with the Oculus bundle currently selling at $400 and permanently reduced to $500, and the HTC Vive getting a recent price cut to $600. Sony, meanwhile, has dropped the effective price of its core VR system by $50 as part of various bundles. And those Microsoft mixed reality headsets that are starting to debut are mostly coming in higher than that eye-catching $300 price point, with actual prices mostly between $300 and $500. I’ve painted a pink band across the chart above to show how that price bracket compares to the rigs Microsoft originally intended to undercut, and you can see that there’s actually overlap with the current prices of both the Oculus Rift bundle and the PlayStation VR, while the HTC Vive is just $100 more.

Of course, Microsoft’s other big price argument is that its rigs won’t require such high-end PCs, offering at least a decent experience on more generic PCs and therefore providing a lower total cost of ownership than HTC and Oculus’s solutions. And I don’t mean to pick on Microsoft – others have pitched standalone VR headsets which are intended to sit between the mobile VR and high-end rig prices, but they’re also aiming at that same $300-500 price bracket that’s now being squeezed from the top.

All of this is great news for the consumer and for the mainstreaming of VR, at least in the short term: the cost of owning a VR system has never been lower, and the range of content (especially games) available for these platforms is growing all the time. All this will expand the addressable market for VR beyond the 4-5 million that have so far bought one of the mobile or premium systems, probably multiplying it several-fold over the next few years.

And yet I have to wonder how sustainable these price cuts will be for the companies: Oculus has always said it sells its hardware at a loss, while HTC was reportedly making a profit on $800 systems but likely isn’t at $600. Oculus’s price discounts may well presage new hardware coming soon which could see the price point of newer systems creep back up, but HTC may have a hard time rolling back its price discounts without new hardware. It can ill afford to sell VR systems at a loss given the company’s overall losses and the state of its smartphone business, hence recent reports that it’s exploring strategic options including a sale or spin-off of the Vive business, which after all has little connection to its phone effort. Facebook can certainly afford to fund ongoing losses for some time to come, but its platform has been the least adopted of the major systems so far, though the price discounts may help change that.

Meanwhile, the opportunity in the middle of the market is going to be increasingly challenging because the price differential versus the premium experiences is significantly less than it once was, making life harder for the Daydream, HTC, and Facebook standalone headsets due to hit the market soon as well as those Windows headsets. And of course at the same time the other part of the mixed reality spectrum – augmented reality – is going gangbusters with both major smartphone platforms creating tools for developers to leverage the largest installed base of consumer devices out there. It’s going to be an interesting period for the VR market.

Recent weeks have been a great reminder that some big companies that once focused almost entirely on software and online services have become incredibly interested in and serious about making hardware. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have each made major inroads into this space in the last few years, with mixed success, and show signs of getting deeper into the hardware market in the next few months. What has motivated this push into hardware, and where is it likely to lead?

Five Years of Significant Change

Go back just over five years to the beginning of 2012, and three big names in the consumer tech industry – Microsoft, Google, and Facebook – were largely absent from the hardware market. Microsoft made Xbox consoles and PC accessories, but allowed PC OEMs and smartphone vendors to make the hardware that ran its operating systems. Google worked with partners to create its Nexus phones to show off the best of Android but in reality the market was carried by OEMs there too. And Facebook was a social network with no aspirations in hardware at all. Fast forward to today and these companies each now have a significant presence in hardware. How did we get here?

The history is different for each of these companies:

• Microsoft:
  • launched its Surface line of personal computers in October 2012 (the brand had previously been used for tabletop computers), and has launched several more Surface Pros as well as the Surface Book, Laptop, and Studio
  • announced its acquisition of Nokia’s devices business in 2013
  • unveiled HoloLens in early 2015
• Google:
  • acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012 and owned it for a couple of years before selling much of it on to Lenovo in 2014
  • launched the Chromebook Pixel laptop in 2013 and updated it in 2015
  • launched the Pixel C tablet in 2015
  • partnered with TP-Link and Asus to make OnHub routers in 2015
  • unveiled the Pixel phones, Google Home voice speaker, and Google WiFi routers in 2016
• Facebook:
  • partnered with HTC to create the HTC First, the “Facebook Phone”, in 2013
  • acquired Oculus in 2014
  • created the Building 8 group and hired Regina Dugan to run the team focused on new hardware projects in 2016.

The pattern, however, is the same: each company has steadily invested more and more in its own hardware over time, and I’ve only covered the history here. Looking forward, Google is expected to launch more Pixel phones, a possible new Chromebook Pixel, a smaller Google Home device, and possibly Google Assistant-powered earbuds later this year, and Facebook has recently been reported to be working on voice speakers, video conferencing hardware, and more. Both Facebook and Google have also consolidated their previously disparate hardware efforts under unified leadership.

Control and New Sources of Revenue the Drivers

What, then, are the drivers of this increased investment in hardware? The simple answer is twofold: these companies want more control over areas they’ve previously had to cede to others, who have often had their own priorities, and there are new revenue streams in providing hardware, which become particularly important as consumers stop paying for traditional software.

Steve Ballmer arguably kicked off the hardware investment era at Microsoft with his Devices and Services strategy, which was a recognition that those two categories and not software sales would be the sources of future revenue for the company, and led to its acquisition of the Nokia devices business and launch of Surface. As other companies – notably Apple and Google – created the expectation that operating systems and productivity software would be free, and funded their own efforts in these areas through device purchases and ad revenue, it became clear that Microsoft’s model would have to shift too.

But both the Surface and Pixel lines can also be seen as attempts to exert greater control over the end user experience than working through OEMs allowed either company. That was born out of frustration over both the lack of competitiveness in the hardware OEMs were creating, largely versus Apple, and also the way the companies’ software features and services were often buried behind layers of user interface and crapware provided by OEMs and their partners. Facebook’s hardware efforts also stem from its frustration at missing out on the last round of user interfaces and platforms, primarily mobile, and again dominated by Apple on the one hand and Google and its OEMs on the other. Investing early in VR was an attempt to stake a claim in what might become the next user interface and ensure a leading role, while the efforts rumored more recently are clearly a response to Amazon’s success in controlling another new user interface category.

These companies have also seen the benefits that accrue to those companies which are able to combine their own hardware and software in a tightly integrated fashion, designing and commissioning their own chips and other components to create highly optimized experiences, with Apple again the prime example of this once-derided strategy. Apple’s AR push with ARKit is just the latest example of how this strategy has allowed it to pull ahead of others by controlling the whole widget from start to finish.

Mixed Success at Best, So Far

For all that, the early efforts from each of these companies have met with mixed success at best so far. Facebook’s phone push with HTC never went anywhere, leaving it entirely without a stake in mobile platforms, while Oculus hasn’t been a huge seller in the VR market and Oculus’s business is still formally immaterial to Facebook’s overall finances.

Google’s hardware has a mixed record too, with the Motorola acquisition a failure, the Pixel laptop and tablets also-rans in their respective markets, and the Pixel phone a modest seller in its first year thanks to limited supply and distribution channels. The Google Home seems to be selling decently well as the only real competition to the Amazon Echo, but it’s far from clear what its long-term business plan is here – advertising seems the obvious revenue model, but is fraught with risk and likely to encounter significant resistance from paying customers.

Microsoft’s Surface is arguably the big success story here, though even then it’s a tiny player in the overall PC market, it took several years of work to figure out the right model for the Surface Pro hardware and software, and it has of course recently seen blowback from last year’s reliability issues. The Nokia acquisition, meanwhile, may have become an inevitability by the time it happened, but certainly hasn’t panned out well either. And HoloLens has an interesting role in the enterprise and education markets, but is far from a mainstream AR or VR product.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s clear that we’re going to see more of this stuff from these three companies in the next few months and years, with a launch event from Google this fall a certainty and some kind of new hardware products from Facebook early next year also looking increasingly likely. And yet it’s far from certain how these devices will perform given this patchy history. The categories Facebook is getting into seem like a poor fit either for its expertise or for customers’ perceptions of what Facebook is as a company – I’d argue the push into hardware for ad-based companies is particularly tough, because the products customers know them best for are all free. Thus, they either have to subsidize their hardware efforts with ad revenue or substantially change customers’ perceptions of their brands. The lack of experience with hardware itself can also create problems. To go even further, I’d argue that if we’ve learned anything over the last couple of years about Facebook, it’s that it’s pretty great at squeezing more revenue out of already successful social products, but pretty terrible at creating brand new ones, let alone anything in hardware.

All that said, it’s possible that we’ll see some really good stuff out of these companies too. Microsoft has demonstrated an innovative streak in hardware that’s been refreshing in a market dominated by a lot of me-too products, while the combination of hardware and software in Google’s Pixel was actually pretty compelling too. All of these are companies packed with smart people and impressive capabilities around software, AI and machine learning, and more skills which can be applied to their hardware efforts. In the process of pursuing these hardware ambitions, these companies have also pushed competitors and partners to do better, and that’s particularly clear in the PC business, where the Surface has arguably shaken some life into the OEMs.

Overall, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty over the exact direction the hardware pushes at these erstwhile software companies will take over the coming years, and how well it will work out for them. But it’s abundantly clear that each is now very serious about hardware and going to spend a lot of money in the coming years trying to figure that out.