Re:Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet...
by mantap on Sunday December 08, 2019 @01:40AM
(#21734652)
HomePod flopped because few people want to spend hundreds of dollars on Siri when they could spend tens of dollars on Google home which is a better voice assistant. Having good audio quality doesn't explain the price tag when you can pair Google home with a dumb speaker if you find the audio quality is insufficient.
They almost did it with wireless speakers (the HomePod is an absolute engineering marvel, entirely unparalleled as a speaker), but they left out bluetooth in a platform play for AirPlay on their own phones/tablets, and it basically flopped. It would have been an airpods-level success if it were a record player that could play everybody’s records.
People keep talking about how they might do it with cars, or televisions, or glasses, or whatever. But so far, as yet, that has failed to materialize.
Edit: I left out the watch, despite it being the best selling watch. It isn’t as better than a normal watch as an iPhone was better than a blackberry; it is merely sufficient: great, but certainly not insanely so. If it could support Google Assistant instead of Siri, and had better bluetooth device support, and didn’t require an iphone, it might be. But the watch presently really just falls short of the Apple level expectation for a product. To be fair, that level is literally “insane”.