Facebook’s announcement of their latest line of Portal screens last week is just the latest in a rapid-fire series of home-related releases from the major technology platforms recently. The race for control of the home—not just the living room—is very much on.
As the home wars shape up, five key realities are becoming apparent about how the battle for control of the home is going to play out, and just how important control of the home is going to be for the tech platforms.
1) The key is owning cameras in the home, not screens.
Historically when people have thought about technology companies entering the “home,” they have tended to think in terms of controlling screens in specific rooms. Most famously, for the last 10 to 15 years there has been a raging debate among pundits about who would ultimately control the “living room screen.”
As it turns out, that was the wrong way to think about things.
While there are only a handful of screens in my home, there are an order of magnitude more cameras scattered throughout different rooms, on doors and embedded in systems.
By my count in our house we have just four screens (setting aside laptops and phones), but nearly 20 cameras running.
Control of cameras in the home is turning out to be the most important beachhead for collecting data and context and creating better at-home experiences and service. Screen control— especially with the easy presumption that nearly everyone always has a phone on them at all times—suddenly seems secondary.
2) To date, the major tech platforms have clear areas of camera dominance and service quality in the home, based on their natural strengths.
In our home we are running five distinct camera systems, which you can think of as a set of concentric circles.
On the outside of our home we are running a security systems from a startup called Deep Sentinel. At our doors we are running Amazon cameras (Ring and Key). Inside rooms we are predominantly running Google cameras (Nest and Home), with one or two Alexa devices as well. In our hands, most of the time, we have Apple cameras in our phones and laptops. For the small amount of virtual reality we play with, we use Oculus from Facebook. It has about a dozen cameras on the headset alone.
When I think about how each of these camera ecosystems slot into our lives, they are basically in keeping with the area where each technology platform is naturally strongest.
Amazon runs our doors, because getting things into our house and through our doors is Amazon’s area of strength.
Google has largely displaced Amazon in our rooms because we have been using Nest cameras forever—since they were Dropcams—and that point of camera leverage was the dominant lever that pulled us into the Google Home ecosystem. Google’s service coverage, and excellent software, voice recognition, etc., makes them hard to defeat at the room scale.
At the “hand” scale, while the gap has closed significantly, Apple still has a clear area of dominance because of its hardware design, and iMessage.
At the emergent wearable/face level Facebook currently has the lead with Oculus, as the only major technology platform that has deeply focused on releasing consumer products in the VR space—at least for now.
In other words, the entry point into the home is less room-specific and more a matter of considering the form factor where each technology platform has an advantage.
3) The technology platforms largely compete for the “concentric circles” of camera control around their core area of strength.
Each of the technology platforms is trying to leverage their ring of camera service dominance into adjacent rings of services.
Amazon, sitting at our doors, is trying to move outward toward neighborhood security products on the Ring platform, and is making an enormous push toward quality room-scale services with Alexa (a model they get a lot of credit for pioneering, even if by my assessment their devices are behind Google’s in quality).
Google is clearly attempting to push toward owning the “doors” of the home, and improving their associated commerce offerings—as well as pushing in on Apple at the device layer with Pixel phones, etc.
Apple is pushing out from their device layer of dominance toward room-scale devices with HomePod, etc. By all accounts, they are also pushing in from handheld devices toward wearables—even if they have not yet officially announced much.
Finally there is Facebook, which made an early strong play in the wearable space, which is where they are trying to stake their device claim. They are a bit of an oddity because after a few failed attempts at devices, they are skipping that ring and making a play for the room-scale devices with their Portal line. Despite the huge network advantage they have toward getting Portal adopted, I do not believe that they can possibly win the room-scale war because they lack a path to the camera-dominance and integrated services they would need to compete with any of the other three major platforms in the race.
4) The home tech ecosystems are going to be far more ‘closed’ platforms than we are used to from either the internet or the mobile-app world.
One thing this model of the home-device market somewhat presupposes is that the home tech ecosystems are going to be far more “closed” than technology platforms we have recently watched develop.
I am confident this is true for two reasons. The first is privacy and security. Somewhat because of the cultural atmosphere, and somewhat because of the extreme intimacy and trust necessary to be surrounded by cameras at home, the big platforms are not going to risk openness even if they wanted to.
Of course, they also have no interest in openness in the home. All four major platforms have the scale, and the scope of important home-scale services is limited enough, that they would prefer to stay closed and bundle their systems together. The Amazon Alexa team may be pursuing a bit more of an open/embedded ecosystem strategy than most. But as I see it there is going to be such leverage in owning the whole home—or at least the whole layer of a home—that we are going to see the home wars tend toward closed systems versus. open ones.
5) Ownership of the “home” is going to generate far more lock-in and potential value from service extension than historical technology platforms.
I strongly believe that the home market is going to generate a ton of lock-in. On simplistic terms, if you want to switch from Android to Apple right now, all you need to do is swap out one phone. When you want to switch your home system, you are talking about replacing dozens of cameras, devices and services. The barriers to switching will be much higher.
That likely means that the long-term economics and ability for tech platforms to successfully bundle services and truly own the digital home is going to far exceed the lock-in and dominance that they can execute around phones, laptops and wearables.
The question will be whether tech platforms can leverage successful lock-in at the home to our mobile devices and laptops. I think the answer might be yes: I'm more likely to fully move to Android from Apple because my house has gone Google, for instance. In theory, that could make the current device “home-wars” far more important to the long-term dominance of different technology platforms than people actually realize.
Conclusion
Historically when we think about the relationship between different technology companies, the discussion is always about what services they own (search, social, messaging, commerce, etc.) and how dominance in one type of service allows (or doesn’t allow) for extension into other related services.
With the explosion of home devices, I think for the first time we have to legitimately consider the special deployment or dominance of different companies, and how that is going to help them extend or shrink over time.
It is quite possible that the home-device wars in general, and the camera wars specifically, are going to turn out to be far more important in the history of platform competition than people initially realized.
In the end it could all come down to simple math. It is easier to replace one phone than replacing dozens of cameras and devices in your home.