I’m not sure if there is a misunderstanding of the smart speaker category or if it is just because of how I have my news, analysis, and Twitter feed curated. Whichever the case, I’d like to elaborate on how I think about this space now that we have a few years of market intelligence and consumer behavior with these products in our database.
In retrospect, we should have seen this category coming from a mile away. To more greatly understand why this category took off so quickly all we need to do is look back at the iPod, perhaps even further to the Walkman. The value of a personal and mobile music collection was a driving force behind some of the most successful consumer electronics products up until the smartphone. To this day, listening to that music collection on smartphones remains one of the most common use cases. Bottom line, music matters a lot to consumers.
