So there’s Apple’s tremendous history of category innovation and disruption in a nutshell. But we know where they’ve been, and what founder and visionary Steve Jobs was able to do. We’re seeing a shift now in the product categories that are being defined around the smart home, and Apple’s a different company now. It’s got a different sort of mission, being the most valuable company in the world. And I’ve noticed of late, I’ve been excited about some of the things that Amazon has been doing around the smart phone, which of course is the next battlefield for consumer tech.

The smart home has all sorts of things we can automate, all sorts of entertainment, HVAC, television, all kinds of audio. So this is where consumer product innovation is focusing right now, and you see lots of players there, and I know Apple wants it to be in that space, but I am somewhat unimpressed with what they’re doing there. And Amazon, just two weeks ago, had this big rollout of their Echo product line, the next generation of that, and they had a slew of stuff. I wouldn’t say that everything grabs me, or maybe say, “Hey, I really want that.” But some of the Echo offerings were quite beautiful. The industrial design was what reminded me of Apple’s industrial design, frankly, of the kind of, “oh, I really want to buy that ’cause it looks really cool” feeling.

That somewhat rambling preamble, Dirk … What’s your take on this? How are you seeing Amazon and Apple change positions over time as product innovators?

Amazon did have their event, and I don’t think it’s Amazon. I don’t think anybody has stepped into those shoes yet. The role that Apple filled from when the … God, there’s been so many devices and evolutions over the years. From the iPod, or we might even say the candy colored iMacs and that generation of devices, which started Apple shooting back up the design innovation leadership scale, from that point forward until the death of Steve Jobs, they ascended to and became the clear leader. And in that process, they had a handful of what I’ll say are … revolutionary is too frothy, but really important things. I mean, the iPhone being the pinnacle of it, but the iPod, the iPad, and at smaller levels, other products.

Again, we talked before on the show, and it’s been some years, so maybe our listeners now aren’t going to remember it, about one of the most magical, for me, was the … What are the names, they all blend together? The Air. The teeniest of the laptop.

At this point, Apple probably isn’t worse. It probably is a little worse, but it’s in this pack with Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook, and nobody’s going back to that old Apple vanguard leadership model. I think Apple’s probably the least likely of them to do so. Just showing zero innovation in the past six or seven years now since Steve passed. Five years, maybe, 2012.

To me, to get to the more timely issue, what we saw out of Amazon was nothing of the level of the old Apple stuff. It’s certainly ahead of where Apple is now, as Apple has their events and they released a lot of me too, mediocre groan-worthy crap and try and treat it like it’s another iPhone. Amazon has moved past that mark, but they aren’t anywhere near, from my perspective of asserting that mantle of leadership that Apple wore for more than a decade, and to me, it’s still unclear who’s going to emerge. Maybe we could say Amazon’s the favorite now, but Google and Facebook both in different ways from different perspective have the possibility to do that. So Amazon, they announced some good products, some interesting things, but my heart isn’t racing yet.

The way they’re putting the products out, the hardware actually reminds me of the way Google does software. Google rolls out these betas that are often … don’t amount to a huge splash, right? So, we remember Google Wave and things like that, that didn’t quite take off. But they were market tests, in a way, and I think that’s what Amazon’s approach to hardware has been, and I think that’s how they’re going to infiltrate the smart home. They’re going to have enough of these experiments with different form factors, different ways of designing the hardware, with different looks, different appeals to different market segments, and I think they’re going to find out the stuff that’s working and build on that, and jettison the stuff that doesn’t.

So this is the complete … In some ways, this is the opposite of how Apple approaches design for products, because they have this one stellar experience that everybody wants or everybody did want when it came out. I’m not sure what the better way to approach it is, but that’s my two cents on Amazon’s approach to hardware. Dirk, I know you’re not a fan of the Echo, but given that approach, do you think that’s a good strategy for Amazon, or is that a wait and see if they’re successful in a larger sense?

But okay, that’s one category. Then you’ve got self-driving cars, and Amazon as far as we know is at ground zero on that one, and Google is way out ahead, competing with other companies. Companies like Tesla, companies like old school auto companies. Then you have space flight, and there you have Virgin competing with Elon Musk competing with Jeff Bezos. Amazon, again, but I think it’s a different company. Now, it’s orders plural of magnitude of attention to different product categories today as opposed to 10 years from now, or 10 years before, when it was just the personal consumer computing products category.

So that’s another complicating factor. These different companies are going to win and lose in different categories, but who is going to emerge as the Skynet, right? To take this dystopic science fiction look at it. Or, will there not be any one emerging? Is it going to be more flat, just because the breadth of things that are being worked on and that the people care about is so vast? I think only time will tell on that.

It’s interesting to me the way that technology is permeating all these different areas of our lives, and as they get into these more complex areas, necessarily the winners and losers … First off, it’s taking a good long time for us to figure out who’s going to dominate those spaces. And secondly, it’s possible that no one is going to dominate those spaces for some time.

You can find The Digital Life on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Player FM, and Google Play, and if you want to follow us outside the show, you can follow me on Twitter @JonFollett. That’s J-o-n F-o-l-l-e-t-t. And of course, the whole show is brought to you by Go Info, which you can check out at goinvo.com. That’s g-o-i-n-v-o.com. Dirk?