The Thing About Amazon (Premium)

I needed a few days to decompress after Amazon's massive set of announcements on Thursday. There is so much going on here, but what I'd like to focus on today is Amazon's general smart home strategy.

And it is brilliant.

Let's not linger on the specifics. Yes, Amazon announced over a dozen new or updated hardware products on Thursday, not to mention a wide array of new and improved services that will make those devices even more valuable to its customer base. What's more important, perhaps, is the net effect that all these changes will have on the Alexa ecosystem. And how Amazon's strategy is geared specifically at growing and maintaining that ecosystem.

And, boy, does ecosystem matter.

Think back to when Windows phone first launched in 2010. I loved that Microsoft took a different and user-centric approach to mobile computing. But I was worried about a few issues. That Microsoft tried to ape Apple and pursued the consumer market first, rather than its core business customers. The immaturity of the new platform, which would repeatedly and belatedly add missing features years after the competition. And the lack of a major hardware player that was all-in on the platform. Yes, Samsung, LG, and others shipped a handful of Windows phones, but this was a hedging side-business, and not the focus (pardon the pun, Samsung fans). Their best phones ran Android.

When Nokia signed on to Windows phone, and not just to use the system but to partner on the platform itself, I saw a ray of hope. Here was a hugely popular mobile device maker that could turn things around. And Nokia was so thoroughly invested that it threw its weight behind a family of hardware peripherals, software applications, and services, all of which were unique to the platform. In this way, Microsoft and Nokia together closed the loop on my early worries. They created a true ecosystem that might rival Android and iOS.

OK, we all know the history there. But it wasn't until Nokia signed on that Windows phone stood a chance at all, and while things didn't exactly go their way, that collective effort is what was required. Both companies may or may not have made some bad decisions. But they were all-in on Windows phone.

By way of contrast, consider Microsoft's approach to the smart home market. The software giant followed in Apple's footsteps by releasing its own digital assistant, called Cortana, on its own smartphone platform exclusively at first. That Windows phone had crested at that moment and was already on the downward side of its lifetime was, at that moment, not clear. But by tying Cortana to a failing platform, it got off to a bad start.

Microsoft eventually brought Cortana to Windows 10, of course. But that just limited its exposure and popularity. And through a variety of circumstances---many more people use mobile devices than PCs, they are more engaged when they do so, and personal assistants just don't make much sense on legacy PCs---doing so did nothi...