Year five begins. CES verdict from every floor report: ALEXA WON, and Amazon barely even had a booth. Alexa in fridges, cars, lamps, showerheads — hundreds of third-party devices, all voice-piping to Amazon’s cloud. While Google and Apple were building assistants as FEATURES of their own hardware, Amazon quietly built one as a PLATFORM and let everyone else do the manufacturing. The Echo looked like a gimmick in 2014; it’s an ecosystem in 2017. The platform play is invisible until it’s inevitable (Proverbs file, entry 121 — I’ve started numbering them in the blog since apparently this is a permanent institution).
The winter’s Premier League fixtures deserve their line: Tottenham beat Chelsea to end their thirteen-match winning streak, avenging their dramatic defeat at Stamford Bridge last spring. Dele Alli headed two identical goals against the best defense in the league. Rematches are the universe’s A/B tests.
Nintendo’s full Switch reveal is Thursday — price, date, launch games. My preorder finger is stretched and ready. The console-handheld hybrid (#093) is about to be either brilliant or doomed, still no middle setting available.
TIL: wake-word detection runs ON-DEVICE (tiny always-on model listens for “Alexa,” only then streams to cloud) — a privacy architecture AND a latency one. The edge/cloud split is the decade’s design pattern. Everything ends up a cache hierarchy.