Would you like a free Google Home Mini? The suggestion from Morgan Stanlay analyst Brian Nowak is that Google give away a device to every home in the US to avoid losing ground to Amazon. He even extends that to suggest Google should make it a global giveaway, no small undertaking considering manufacturing cost for a Google Home Mini is probably around $26.
The argument is that Amazon are currently ahead with more users owning an Amazon Echo than a Google or other device. It’s essential for Google to capture market share as doubtless the future of Voice search will be dictated by the platform that users opt for.
Just as Apple was taking the market lead in smartphones, Google stalled them overnight by giving away it’s Android operating system to mobile handset manufacturers and it’s not the most popular operating system in the world… incidentally meaning that almost all Android users will use Google Search, Google Maps and other Google apps as default.
Now Google need to adopt the same strategy to stall Amazon’s smart speaker dominance. The cost to give away a device to every US home would be somewhere in the region of $3.3 billion, which Brian Nowak thinks a low price to pay. it’s about 3% of operating expenses and the prize of capturing the voice search market which is where analysts see the future of eommerce makes that well worth the investment.
Failure for Google to act could easily see their dominance in monetised shopping search decimated if consumers use other platforms. Whilst Google is dominant on desktops and mobile, if they don’t position themselves for dominance on voice search and commerce then one day they could be recalled in the same breath as companies such as Kodak, Nokia and Yahoo!
4 Responses
Makes no sense at all. Global give away? How to limit one by a person? Giving away Windows 10 Home Edition would make more sense.
Google home is already very close to or ahead of Amazon.
Why would Google need to do this? It would create clickbait from the gutter press about putting a free spy in every home nonsense.
i think if Google just charged cost price then it would be half the price of an echo dot and would soon become the leading smart speaker