Coffee and Alibaba Envy in Seattle

Across the fabless semiconductor and algorithm-driven crowd of entrepreneurs in Israel there is a palpable echo from Google’s billion-dollar acquisition of Waze. This echo is known locally as Waze envy. It ripples across the average Israeli start-up executive’s psyche like the narrow rings buried deep in the trunk of a tree that has survived a nasty drought or like a baby boom demographic bulge percolating through an economy.

I was visiting Seattle for the past three days and I swear there was a similar frisson of tension in the air in this mellowest of all cities. Mingled amidst the aroma of some of the most carefully curated coffee in the world is the unmistakable stank of Alibaba envy.

Nowhere is this olfactory experience more notable than in South Lake Union, where Amazon plies its e-commerce trade. Amazon may be remaking the world of e-commerce in the free world and redefining physical and virtual product delivery and consumption, but Alibaba just stole the e-commerce crown with its record-breaking IPO.

I got a sense of the severity of this local condition – along with the ability of its sufferers to suppress it – while sipping coffee with a friend who works for Amazon. Prior to our meeting I insisted that she bring two Amazon T-shirts, one for me and one for my rabid AmazonFresh acolyte son. To which she replied: “Amazon doesn’t do merch.”

This fact threw me a bit having just come from T-Mobile’s offices where the company maintains a merch-filled store by the front door. My retinas are still recovering from the magenta overload.

But the paucity of merch was only a hint of the near ascetic experience that awaits employees at Amazon. My friend gave no hint of the deep-seated longing to distribute free tschotchkes and report gaudy profit figures to shareholders. The company that cultivates customers like prized orchids with some of the most extraordinary customer service experiences in the world is light on the perks and freebies outside of stock and a few other practical and appropriate compensation goodies. And Amazon famously reports little or no profits.

Most frustrating of all for me, as an auto industry consultant, is Amazon’s decision to eschew nearly all automotive-related opportunities. At a time when carriers, handset makers, app developers, content deliverers and advertisers are battling for a slice of the emerging connected car market, Amazon with its burgeoning trove of cloud and commerce delivery solutions remains aloof.

Now Alibaba waltzes in with its plans to offer wireless service (certainly something Amazon has pondered for its Fire handsets), build its own cars, sell new cars and target automotive aftersales opportunities and auto insurance, and the questions for Amazon become even more urgent. Amazon’s Amazon Prime platform, for one, is crying out for integration into an automotive cloud offering for content delivery and ad hoc e-commerce from cars.

More importantly, the Microsoft Azure cloud service offering, with its growing roster of automotive partners, already considers Amazon to be a major competitor even though Amazon remains silent regarding a coordinated attack on the automotive market. But the automotive-facing resources do not end there. Amazon has speech recognition and text to speech solutions ideally suited to the delivery of audio books via its Audible service. And Amazon Music is accessible from app platforms in most Ford’s, BMW’s and Mini’s.

Amazon is in position to offer a global cloud service for auto makers while also enabling vertical in vehicle applications. In fact, Amazon is one of the few players in the mobile device industry that is able to “get away” with forking Android to its own purposes, a skill that auto makers will be happy to take advantage of.

Maybe Alibaba’s public offering will be the final straw that stirs Amazon into the automotive mix. There is no question that auto makers would welcome the kind of positive brand buzz and customer experience that Amazon can bring to automotive implementations.

Read the Amazon Fire feature description (below) with an eye toward automotive applications and you will understand what I am driving at (from an NDTV Gadgets Website.):

“The Fire OS 4 deeply integrates with the Amazon cloud to further improve performance and ease-of-use, to enable cross-platform syncing, and to power services that require more processing than is possible on a mobile device.

“Fire OS 4 updates the visual design of the UI and adds custom Profiles option for multiple users using the same device. With Profiles, multiple users will be able to create a custom profile on the device with their own individual email, Facebook and Twitter accounts, settings such as display brightness, bookmarks, spot in a movie, and game levels.

“The updated Fire OS also includes a Fire TV feature called 'ASAP' (Advanced Streaming And Prediction) which as per the company will predict the movies and TV episodes of user's choice, and queue it up automatically for streaming so that the content starts playing instantly when the user decides to view it.

“'Smart Suspend' is included in Fire OS 4, and is said to develop a device-specific profile based on user behavior, to turn off wireless connectivity in slow periods. Amazon says that this helps the device to deliver up to 25 percent more standby battery life, and that wireless connectivity is turned on intermittently to ensure all notifications and emails are synced when the user picks up the device.

“Amazon has also brought in Firefly, an augmented reality feature which essentially lets users identify content like artwork, text, and audio instantly.

“The online retail giant is also promising free unlimited storage in Amazon Cloud Drive for photos taken on Fire devices. Also new is the Family Library feature, allowing users to share apps, games, audiobooks, books, and Prime Instant Video content with other members of their household.”

Now imagine all of that functionality is actually referring to an automotive implementation including identifying different users of the same car, augmented reality for accessing content or understanding vehicle functions and maybe a novel head-up display experience. The only thing missing is a means for collecting, interpreting and delivering crowd-sourced Waze-like traffic data and safety related contextual information. And everything wrapped in an Amazon-delivered and evolving, personalized cloud platform.

Come on, Amazon. Don’t get lost in Alibaba envy. Show us all how it ought to be done by a company that knows how to juice those all important CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) scores. The automotive industry needs you!