5/5 (11)

One week ago, Amazon put quite an effort hosting its annual hardware event, presenting plenty of options to take Alexa with you when you leave the house – the only place it has seen so far.

But is Alexa in fact ready to leave home?

And is Alexa actually able to convince people that it’s the voice interface for everywhere, and not just for home?

Amazon has tried to get this done through various channels and product innovations before. Alexa has appeared now and then in Bluetooth speakers and headphones, and in some cars in a failed effort to partner with GM. However, none of these attempts have helped Amazon gaining market share when it comes to using its voice assistant on the go. Amazon has a good value proposition for customer’s homes, as echo speakers are great for music, timers and smart home features. However, the company lacks a key factor that plays an important role for consumers, namely being the default assistant on the phone. In its ambition to become more ubiquous in consumer’s minds when thinking outside of the home, Alexa needs to become more prevalent and put simple: get a space on consumers smartphones.

It seems the most efficient way to ensure you are up to date on consumers lives is to be on their smartphone. Alexa is via Amazon’s app partially there but that’s far away from Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. Siri isn’t consumers first choice when it comes to voice assistants, but because Apple will not allow for it, it is the only viable option on iOS for now. Putting it plainly, Alexa might be just another justification for being a fashion appearance unless it somehow reaches platform integration with Android or iOS.

Among the products Amazon presented last week during its Seattle event, Echo frames, Echo loop and Echo buds all resemble ways to take Alexa wherever you go.

But is this really the way to go? Or are we just seeing another attempt in trying to push Alexa on the street without seeing the bigger picture? Come on Amazon, we have seen Google glasses fail in 2011 already.

In my opinion the most severe questions is whether Amazon will either make Alexa a vital part of consumer’s life so that they demand it to take a bigger part in their day-to-day activities, or Amazon can develop the voice assistant’s feature quick enough to make it as useful on the go as it is at home. In either way, platform integration and the development of an ecosystem to support Alexa seem to be the key success factors here. For now, its market share is dropping by more than 10% since last year – what’s next, Amazon?

 

References:

Lardinois, F. (2019). Amazon wants to put microphones into your rings and glasses – TechCrunch. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/amazon-wants-to-put-microphones-into-your-rings-and-glasses/ [Accessed 6 Oct. 2019].

Etherington, D. (2019). Is Amazon’s Alexa ready to leave home and become a wearable voice assistant? – TechCrunch. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/is-amazons-alexa-ready-to-leave-home-and-become-a-wearable-voice-assistant/ [Accessed 6 Oct. 2019].

Bohn, D. (2019). Alexa’s real competition is still your phone screen. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/28/20887378/amazon-alexa-competition-siri-google-assistant-echo-buds [Accessed 6 Oct. 2019].

Routley, N. (2019). The Fight for Smart Speaker Market Share. [online] Visual Capitalist. Available at: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/smart-speaker-market-share-fight/ [Accessed 6 Oct. 2019].

5/5 (5)

Microsoft has deployed the first datacenter in the Scottish Sea in an effort to test more sustainable and efficient solutions for storing vast quantities of data. Datacenters typically generate a lot of heat, which could be solved by placing them underwater to benefit from natural cooling effects and controlled environments.

 

Project Natick

Project Natick started back in 2015 as a research project to investigate the potential benefits that undersea datacenters could provide to cloud users all over the world. The idea behind the project is that nearly 50% of the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data has short distances to travel and can thus ensure rapid provisioning and reduce latency.

 

Why do we need to think of alternative solutions to store our data?

The demand for datacenter resources is growing industry wide exponentially as corporations progressively shift their networks and data to the cloud. Bent Cutler, a project manager within Microsoft’s Project Natick, puts it this way “When you are in this kind of exponential growth curve, it tells you that most of the datacenters that we’ll ever build we haven’t built yet”, underscoring the need for novel innovations what’s about to become or already is the most critical piece of our infrastructure.

 

First of Many

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, plans to deploy more underwater data centers in the future, not only because they are designed to operate independently without direct supervision for up to 5 years, but also they are very fast to manufacture. “It was very fast to build the entire supply chain of it, from start to finish, it took us 90 days”, said Nadella. After this 5-year period, the datacenter vessel will be retrieved again, reloaded with new computers and redeployed in an effort to target a lifespan of at least 20 years. Moreover, the datacenters are intended to be fully recycled from the material of the vessel to recycling at the datacenter’s end of life. Research has shown that Natick datacenter consume no water for cooling or other means and are in turn not harmful for marine ecosystems.

 

Are we on the right way to store our data in the oceans?

Its without question that we need storage for all the data we possess and our demand for datacenter is increasing exponentially right now, the trend depicting an even higher increase in the future. Cities are growing and datacenter are swallowing tons of energy and space – it is yet to see whether the ocean is our best alternative.

 

Related:

• Check out the Project Natick research page
• Read the Microsoft Green Blog to learn about Microsoft’s environment and sustainability initiatives
• Read about Phase 1 of Project Natick

 

References

BBC News. (2019). Microsoft sinks data centre off Orkney. [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813 [Accessed 17 Sep. 2019].

Loughlan, J. (2016). News Briefing: Energy – Microsoft trails underwater data centre. Engineering & Technology, 11(2), pp.17-17.

Microsoft Stories. (2019). Under the sea, Microsoft tests a datacenter that’s quick to deploy, could provide internet connectivity for years – Stories. [online] Available at: https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/ [Accessed 17 Sep. 2019].

Microsoft Projects (2019). Project Natick. [online] Natick.research.microsoft.com. Available at: https://natick.research.microsoft.com [Accessed 17 Sep. 2019].

The Verge. (2019). Microsoft sinks a data center off the Scottish coast. [online] Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433206/microsoft-underwater-data-center-project-natick [Accessed 17 Sep. 2019].