News and Views from Tech Maven Fritz Maffry
My Kansas City-based colleague Fritz Maffry writes:
The race is on for who is going to win the battle in autonomous vehicles, smart assistants, and artificial intelligence.
Right now, Tesla, Microsoft, and Amazon seem to be out-executing Google, Apple, and Facebook. IBM is pouring it on for cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.
Google has yet to break out new lines of business into profit centers that would take the company to another level of growth, so who is going to nail it? Tesla is doing awfully well as an innovation champion of electric vehicles, and related business models: charging, solar, and all it takes to make it all work together: batteries and software (yes, the Gigafactory is operating).
Amazon is doing a great job of extending Alexa lead in smart assistants, but now everyone is piling on as this is a bus they can’t afford to miss, lest they give away the high ground to their rivals.
Stay tuned. Have you noticed Tesla’s market cap going from $28 billion to $42 billion, while traditional business press largely missed the important needles Tesla was threading. Shame on them; are they really trying to understand? Perhaps they don’t have the knowledge set to analyze correctly.
I wonder if autonomous vehicles will end up being a social success and an individual failure. While I am more inclined to use a vehicle that will take me where I want to go without my having to pay attention there might be less inclination to actually own the vehicle.
So an autonomous taxi, shared vehicle or commercial vehicle that can eliminate the need to hire a driver sure. But a personal vehicle that will likely sit 23 out of 24 hours a day maybe not. It that vehicle can drive itself it doesn’t quite seem like “mine” any longer.
If we have “shared vehicles” the total number of vehicles on the road will likely decrease. From a manufacturers perspective you can sell the feature of a self driving car but you may be selling less of them rather than more.
You bring up a good point that raises the issue: why do we want to own ANY big, expensive item that we use less than 1 out of 24 hours per day, regardless of how it functions?
There are probably a few tools I own which I seldom use. Exercise equipment is probably a classic example for many.
But I do find the potential messaging of self driving vehicles to be very far from the sex symbol we have been sold as the personal vehicle.