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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

No, they know FaceOS and Fire(sale)phone did poorly but that Amazon is getting the side-angle with Echo/Show so they figured they might get a good 2nd place with the "I don't care if it's creepy" crowd.

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Echo did well because it was the first to market and quickly built up an ecosystem. Google home did well because google and because of the integration with their video/music/phone services. There's no incentive to jump on the facebook bandwagon, they offer nothing unique. And even among uneducated consumers, they've got a bad reputation WRT privacy.

If their best and brightest couldn't see that coming... they're in trouble.

This is a video chat hardware device, not an assistant. Facebook has become the de-facto messaging platform for most of the people I know, and Facebook's Video chat is typically what I suggest when I want to do a video conference with a non-technical user. Google totally blew their commanding network and technical lead by the repeated gchat -> hangouts -> duo migrations. No one I know is typically logged into hangouts anymore, and I've never even had a single contact sign up for duo or allo. Facetime is a non-starter for the 80% of the population that uses something other than a Mac and an iOS device. Facebook works everywhere, has all my contacts, and is something people know and use.

>they figured tvey might get a good second place with the "I don't care if it's creepy" crowd.

except, usually you get a much better deal on a product when you go the "i dont care if its creepy" route. this is twice the price of the Amazon Show.

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