100 Million Alexa Devices Sold

Platform War?  Or more like an ecosystem war, the one that will get the most participants creating intelligent value, and combining that into new products.  More more detail at the link.

Amazon says 100 Million Alexa Devices Have been Sold - Whats Next?
Amazon isn’t letting Google own CES (Consumer Electronics Show) without a fight  By Dieter Bohn@backlon  in TheVerge

More than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold. That’s the all-too-rare actual number that Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, Dave Limp, revealed to me earlier this week. That’s not to say Amazon has finally decided to be completely transparent about device sales, however. While the company claims it outstripped its most optimistic expectations for the Echo Dot during the holiday season, Limp wouldn’t give a number for that. Instead, Limp says, Amazon is sold out of Dots through January, despite “pushing pallets of Echo Dots onto 747s and getting them from Hong Kong to here as quickly as we possibly could.”

But back to that 100 million number. Depending on how you count, it’s either seriously impressive or a serious problem for Amazon. On the one hand, 100 million pales in comparison to the number of phones that have either Siri or Google Assistant pre-installed. On the other hand, the word “pre-installed” is the key thing to pay attention to. With Alexa devices, you could argue, consumers are making an active choice to purchase an assistant instead of just getting a default.  .... "