For our generation, the technology giant to compete the mobile phone market has entered the battle is heating up. Because people generally do not carry multiple phones, so this fight is to either win or die.

The same assumption applies to the home market of the battle, at least to the television as the center of the dispute is so predictable. The latest battle for the home market by Amazon Echo successfully kicked off, indicating the brewing war at home may not be so zero. (Editor’s Note: zero-sum game refers to the parties involved in the game, under stringent competition, one of the benefits necessarily implies the loss of the other gains and losses is always the sum of the sum of the parties to the game as “zero” the parties do not exist together. possible.)

Unlike mobile phones and television, the house can have many different intelligent agents, in every corner of the home via a microphone and speaker system. This is how the ecosystem will develop will have a few questions. In particular, it should put more power in the hands of application developers.

In the next few years, my family may have three or four different voice-enabled system, although they have overlapping but different functions. Think I felt very excited about it, but also very reasonable Oh. I hope Sonos system and microphones are upgraded, so I can play high quality music throughout the house via voice. I hope Echo will change, so I enjoy shopping from Amazon. I hope that Apple TV will become more intelligent, you can use Siri and Echo, propose more media requests. And, if Google is not on the list, I would be shocked. But interestingly, unlike other Google services mentioned above, I do not know that it can do nothing for me. Perhaps it will be more focused on e-mail and calendar.

Smart home voice set off war echo Amazon fired the first shot

All of these companies are able to produce hardware. Interestingly, today’s devices cheap enough, consumers can accept, I do not understand why they would give up the home and the front-end service competition. Although the possibility that consumers have all the services is not, no company will be able to win in their most areas of expertise. The company’s services will not work on other companies’ platforms. Therefore, it would be a they can each be assigned a piece of cake in the market.

This also shows that the best equipment business strategy will be to have the right of privacy controls; developer-friendly open API.

For example Uber, its strategy may be to let people use voice commands reservation car. But Uber is impossible to produce their own hardware, so that consumers can use this function at home. If the home is only an intelligent agent platform owner can hike for Uber. Uber wants to get involved would have to accept the conditions, otherwise it will be the first competitor.

However, if the family has several intelligent agents, they have their own microphone, detectors, and even cameras, developers will have more power. In such cases, the best strategy is an open platform. If you want to attract more developers, you need befriended them and give them a platform to build a good foundation.

This and developers in the past 10 years is very different from the situation for granted.

To be sure, the family highly open system, the biggest challenge is privacy and security. Maintain their trust of users, devices and platforms is a family company’s focus.

Now perhaps too early to say, but I believe anyone who thinks this war just another competition in the mobile phone market, they are wrong, this is a new competition. When Amazon Echo become a clear target, Google and many other technology companies in the creation of its competitors, perhaps home voice control will soon be universal.