Amazon will do whatever it can to pull you into Alexa’s ecosystem
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: http://bit.ly/2s1XMYI
Reported today in The Verge.
Amazon will do whatever it can to pull you into Alexa's ecosystem
I've been thinking about how Amazon takes a chaos-energy attitude towards developing ecosystems around its products. When it's trying to get third parties to work with its products, Amazon throws open the doors and invites all comers. When it's making new products itself, Amazon is much more likely than anybody else to just do whatever it wants, sometimes aggressively.
Sometimes that leads to hilarious Alexa products like rings that listen to your whisper, IR blasters, and Alexa party games. Other times it leads to corporate synergy with a burgeoning police interest in surveillance.
Before we get to the dark stuff, let's just take a minute with the latest example of how willing Amazon is to just do whatever it takes to get stuff to work with its ecosystem: creating a hacky box for shooting infrared beams at televisions so you can command them with Alexa. It is the equivalent of that tape deck adapter we used to have to use to get our Sony Discmans to work in our cars. It is very nearly peak Amazon Chaos Energy.
This IR blaster has so infuriated my boss Nilay Patel that I just had to give him some space here in this newsletter to talk about it. Nilay, take it away:
Why can't the TV industry get rid of IR blasters? Infrared control of TVs and cable boxes and streaming devices like Roku players and the Apple TV is flaky and unreliable, and worse, it's one-directional, so there's no way for a device like Amazon's new Alexa IR Compromise Cube to know if that volume-up command actually worked. (The best hack around this issue is the Caavo Control Center, which uses machine vision to monitor the HDMI output of various devices and check that commands have worked. A brute-force hack f