• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, October 3, 2016

Google will unveil its Home device at a “Made By” media event in San Francisco tomorrow; it is expected to be available to turn on bedroom lights, change reservations and answer homework questions in a wireless environment near you by Halloween. A teaser video was posted to YouTube in June.

It is, by all accounts, Google’s answer to Amazon’s Echo.

“But the fact that Google was outmaneuvered by Amazon — not Apple, which builds its own digital assistant technology, called Siri, into its mobile products — has caused head-scratching throughout the technology industry. Amazon has a notoriously uneven track record in making hardware, with some hits, like the Kindle e-reader, and spectacular whiffs, like the Fire Phone,” write Daisuke Wakabayashi and Nick Wingfield for a story in the New York Times. 

They then delve into Google’s siloed empire as the primary reason for the lag. Despite its technological edge in many areas, it has often been handicapped “by a balkanized structure that prevented different groups within the company from working together.”

“Amazon is the accidental winner here,” Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University, tells Wakabayashi and Wingfield. “Amazon got there first, which is superimpressive, and it has been a huge hit.”

On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes that Google is going to block vendors who support Amazon Echo from Home and Chromecast, its line of streaming devices. But installing such a device in one’s home in the first place is, shall we say, bonkers to begin with, he and others maintain.

“Having a live, networked, corporate-controlled mic in your bedroom, living room and toilet is an idea that is so unbelievably terrible on its face that you could use it as the introduction to a term paper in 2040 explaining how human civilization nearly collapsed in the early 21st century,” Doctorow writes.

But even if you’re not worried about a roomful of analysts wearing Bluetooth earbuds listening in on your most revealing conversations, there’s little doubt that the quest for information about us is what’s driving Google’s product introductions. Google is expected to take the wraps off a couple of new smartphones and some additional hardware tomorrow. But it’s not really about the devices, Wired’s David Pierce reminds us.

“What’s Google really about? Attention. Yours, ours, everyone’s. Google’s in the business of getting people to use its products, so that it can collect data with which to both improve its products and make several more bargeloads of advertising money. That’s why Google makes so many good apps for the iPhone, ostensibly its biggest competitor. Google’s product isn’t the phone; it’s what you do with the phone.”

And no one wants to be left behind — neither consumers keeping up with the Joneses nor audio manufacturers, for example, keeping up with the radically evolving way people listen to music. 

“Google has already started to talk to consumer electronics manufacturers about building other devices that will work just like Google Home, Variety has learned,” Janko Roettgers reported last week.  “Key to these efforts is another device that has been built by the same team as Google Home: Chromecast, and its music-loving sibling Chromecast Audio.”

Roettgers writes that “Google revealed key details of this plan during a closed-door meeting with” around 50 industry leaders about a month after publicly unveiling Google Home [at its I/O conference in May]. 

“Some of the companies in attendance have already been working with Google by selling Wi-Fi-enabled speakers powered by Google Cast … and Google now wants to use these existing relationships to get consumer electronics manufacturers to build their own versions of Google Home — smart speakers that are powered by Google’s cloud-based assistant.”

Indeed, Google “has much grander aims for the Assistant,” Farhad Manjoo told us in the New York Times last week. “The company believes that machine learning has advanced to the point that it is now possible to build a predictive, all-knowing, superhelpful and conversational assistant of the sort that [Star Trek’s] Captain Kirk relied on to navigate the stars.”

Manjoo’s reporting indicates that Assistant still has a ways to go before it becomes the “ultimate expression of what Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, once described as the perfect search engine: a machine that ‘understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.’”

But it’s all in the effort, now, isn’t it?