As the world’s biggest consumer tech show wraps up, here’s what Apple, Google, and other giants who made news tell us about tech in 2019.
- Google and Amazon continued duking it out for title of most virtual assistants listening to the most people on the most devices. It’s been a multi-year battle, once led by Amazon, quickly matched by Google, and now escalating between these two companies like a new cold war.
- The biggest news is that Apple–fresh off devastating quarterly earnings that showed iPhone growth has tanked–is making a bigger effort to be interoperable with third-party products, and make its services accessible without using Apple devices themselves.
- When I took a ride in Waymo’s first driverless taxi last year, I noticed something interesting: The app interface doesn’t show your route–it just shows the start point and end point. I joked to one of Waymo’s product developers that it had already designed its interface for flying cars. They laughed, but only a little. Perhaps because that’s exactly the kind of thinking that the mobility industry is doing, now that self-driving technologies are maturing and digital ride hailing has been figured out. The way we move is only going to keep changing.
Source: The 3 biggest trends at CES 2019