Nick Douglas at Lifehacker has a pretty decent article up, examining the phenomenon:
The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced today. It’s the kind of cooperation that we don’t see enough between the Big Five, or really any company that’s grown out of its “desperately cobble together partnerships so we look relevant” phase and into its “abandon all cooperation that doesn’t lock customers into our shitty ecosystem” phase.
Cortana and Alexa’s competitors, Google Assistant and Siri, won’t be integrating any time soon. As Gizmodo notes, Google and Apple have far more users locked into their ecosystems, so they have far less incentive to cooperate with competing systems. By combining forces, Microsoft and Amazon are admitting they’ve lost the war for mobile, (the dominant user interface now), and holding onto their own core competencies: Microsoft for business communication, Amazon for consumption.
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In the short term, all these companies have good reasons to lock up their platforms wherever they still think they can steal market share from the others, and wherever they would rather focus resources on improving their own service instead of handing millions of customers to their competitors through a partnership.
But in the long term, this lock-in keeps the Big Five from innovating, their products leaning on the crutch of the ecosystem, alienating customers who will then abandon the ecosystem for third-party services like Spotify, Dropbox, WhatsApp, 1Password, and Overcast.Sounds about right to me.
Ecosystems are big right now, because of Apple. iTunes and the iOS App Store came into existence at a time when there were no smartphone competitors; Apple was able to lock customers into Apple's orbit, and then milk them for as much money as possible, one tiny transaction at a time, because they were the only game in town. Gamers may decry the new trend of AAA publishers adding microtransactions into full-priced games, but the trend didn't start with videogame publishers. For big, publicly-traded corporations, who are under pressure to increase revenue, year-over-year, every year, the siren song of the ecosystem is well-nigh impossible to ignore.
But if you're not already an ecosystem player, then ecosystems are not your lucrative friends; they're your enemies, the barriers preventing you from convincing consumers to try your product, and to judge your product on its merits. You may well have built a better mousetrap, but if consumers have to abandon the ecosystem they've already bought into, and then expensively buy into yet another ecosystem, just to try the damn thing... well, honestly, would you? Apart from a handful of early adopters with more money than sense, would anybody?
That's a trick question, by the way. Because if the answer had been, "yes," then Windows 10 would not still be languishing at a mid-20's market share percentage after being given away free for two years, and Facebook wouldn't have needed to take such a savage markdown on the Oculus Rift.
Which is why Microsoft are showing signs of surrender. They're no longer trying to turn the Windows Store into a competing game-distribution ecosystem, when Steam is the ecosystem that everyone has already bought into. They're not trying to compete with Amazon's well-established retail supply and delivery chain, when they don't have anything even remotely comparable. They're willing to talk about crossplay with Sony and Nintendo and VALVe, now that they've been forced to merge their XBox Live ecosystem with their Windows 10 ecosystem, only to find that combination still falling short of being a truly viable ecosystem. Cooperation makes sense for a company that's losing the competition.
It's harder to sell to the companies that were winning, though. And make no mistake, Apple and Google are winning. Cooperation makes sense for Microsoft because they don't have an ecosystem of their own. But Google has an ecosystem, and Apple has an ecosystem, and neither gains significantly from opening up those ecosystem to competitors; therefore, they probably won't. If Microsoft had succeeded in establishing a viable Windows 10 ecosystem, they wouldn't be joining forces with Amazon and VALVe now.
[The fact that Microsoft have been openly antagonistic to Google for years doesn't help anything, either. Yes, Microsoft pulled out of the Google antitrust actions last year, but that doesn't mean very much when it was Microsoft that started the antitrust ball rolling in the first place.]
I've been saying for a while now that I wanted Microsoft to start showing some sign that they were aware of how badly they'd failed in their attempt to force-feed their Windows 10 proto-ecosystem to consumers. I wanted to see them start to adjust their approach, to abandon the monopolistic, anti-consumer bullshit, and return to making use of Windows' actual strengths: its ubiquity, and its openness.
We might finally be starting to see the very first baby steps of that process now, more than two years after Windows 10 launched, and over a year after Microsoft were forced to stop force-feeding it to customers when they discovered that they couldn't give Windows 10 away. Forcing consumers to surrender control of their PCs; forcing consumers to buy all their software again, through Microsoft's storefront, while adding nothing of value; forcing consumers to "pay" for their OS with their data and metadata; these were the sort of anti-consumer moves that are borne of warring ecosystems. If Microsoft's new spirit of cooperation means that we see less of this, then I can only approve.
While accepting Windows 10 means accepting a freight of anti-consumer ecosystem bullshit, consumers will continue to stay away in droves; I fully expect tomorrow's market share stats to show that trend continuing unabated. But if Windows 10 can start to mean cross-platform solutions, instead, and a willingness to work with the established players who have already earned supportive customer bases; if Windows 10 continues this trend of being an operating system again, and not just another attempt to shoehorn an unwanted ecosystem onto our PCs; if that continues, then Windows 10 might actually be worth consideration again.
This all assumes, of course, that Microsoft can avoid stepping on any more of the rakes that they've strewn about their own lawn. The damage that Microsoft have done to the trust and goodwill of consumers with their bullshit of the last couple of years should not be underestimated; they've dug a deep hole for themselves, and climbing out will not be easy. But I'm starting to think that it might just be possible. And if one of the "Big Five" can break free of their ecosystem fixations, and succeed in the process, then we might just see the end of the Period of the Warring Ecosystems.