Jan 2, 2019 · 33m · a16z
a16z Podcast | Beyond CES: Connected Home Devices, Voice, and More
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky analyze key trends from CES 2018, exploring the realities of smart home ecosystems, voice interface limitations, and minimalist product design strategies. They provide strategic insights for hardware makers and tech startups on removing daily friction for users rather than over-engineering products around platform hype.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 1.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 1.3 The host pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:25 Refuting the voice assistant trajectory narrative
Benedict Evans explicitly refutes the industry narrative that voice assistants will naturally resolve all knowledge domain gaps, calling it a fundamental misconception.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 22:56 Challenging appliance screen creepBenedict Evans pushes back against adding screens to dishwashers and washing machines, arguing ideal UI design should eliminate questions down to a single button.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 15:40 Explaining the IVR ceiling of voice interfacesEvans educates the audience on why voice assistants act like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) command lines that cannot scale infinitely through simple third-party skills.
The host holds their own ▶ 29:54 Sinofsky's Clippy principle for AI buildersDrawing on his decades of executive leadership at Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky cites the lesson of Clippy to explain why automation products fail if they carry high costs of being wrong.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CES Impressions and Corporate Strategy vs. Org Chart Noise | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Host does not participate as this is a peer dialogue between tech analysts Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky. The speakers discuss CES impressions and explain how corporate org chart dynamics result in redundant product announcements like Samsung's smart whiteboard. | |
| Conglomerate Hardware Strategies and Appliance UI Complexity | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | The host is absent from the exchange. Evans and Sinofsky discuss conglomerate strategies from Korean manufacturers and question whether non-compute appliances like fridges and washing machines need complex UIs. | |
| Executive Mandates vs. Cross-Platform Retail Realities | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | No host participation. Sinofsky and Evans contrast executive mandates like Samsung's Bixby with the retail reality of supporting competing platforms like Alexa and Google Home in stores like Best Buy. | |
| Smart Kitchen Evolution and Point Solutions vs. Unified Systems | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Host is absent. The speakers analyze smart kitchen evolution and draw historical parallels to the adoption of DC motors in 1960s kitchen appliances. | |
| Usability Friction, Guest Dynamics, and Long Replacement Cycles | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Host does not speak. The guests explore usability friction in smart homes, pointing out how house guests or babysitters struggle with fragmented voice commands alongside long appliance replacement cycles. | |
| Voice Interfaces: Speech Recognition vs. Knowledge Resolution | 0 | 4 | 2 | 0 | No host involvement. Evans breaks down a fundamental industry misconception regarding voice platforms, distinguishing speech recognition from knowledge resolution. | |
| AI Fallacies and Hotel Voice Automation Challenges | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Host is absent. Sinofsky recounts a personal story of staying at a Las Vegas hotel where Alexa smart room automation repeatedly failed to adjust the thermostat. | |
| Minimalist Interface Philosophy and Eliminating Daily Friction | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Host does not participate. The speakers critique tech design overkill, advocating for single 'go' buttons over bloated screens on everyday home appliances. | |
| Product Design Choices and Apple's Minimalist Legacy | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | No host involvement. Sinofsky highlights Apple's legacy of removing legacy ports and drives, referencing the original MacBook Air launch. | |
| AI Product Exploration and Advice for Startup Builders | 0 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Host is absent. Sinofsky uses Microsoft Clippy as a cautionary example for AI builders, emphasizing that automated features must achieve near-perfect reliability. |
Statements from this episode (18)
Evans: Big tech product launches often reflect bureaucracy, not strategy
“Is, particularly when you look at kind of a super big company that's got lots of stuff going on, is there are some things that are actually, this is the board level fundamental strategy of what they think is crucial to the existence of the company in the next …”
Sinofsky: Startups overreact to product announcements from big tech competitors
“I think that that's really important, especially in the startup world, because there's this tendency, you know, if you're a startup and you work in a particular space, and then you just hear an announcement from a big company, that they're working on something…”
Sinofsky: Startups shouldn't copy big hardware firms' redundant strategies
“Right, which is, for startups, a super interesting point, because it means, like, if you take the lead from the big companies in what to do, you'll see that all of them, they have the resources to, like, do everything five times.”
Sinofsky: Voice AI hardware ecosystems have not reached steady state
“And the thing is, this is, particularly for voice, this is just another cross-platform kind of thing. Well, we'll get to whether voice is a platform itself, but, like, you know, the idea that you're just going to go do all of these presumes that we've reached …”
Evans: Smart home hardware proliferation relies on smartphone supply chains
“And that's one of the reasons you see so many of these different things, because they're all riding on the smartphone supply chain.”
Evans: Consumers will not upgrade refrigerators solely for smart color screens
“You have like a 10 or 15 year replacement cycle. A 20 year replacement cycle on a fridge. So you're not gonna buy a new fridge just because there's a new one that's got a color screen on it.”
Sinofsky: Only Samsung and LG can manufacture full home appliance suites
“God, that means that all of these companies are gonna have to make all of those parts, and there are only two companies that can do that, which is Samsung and LG.”
Sinofsky: Single-vendor smart home platform dominance is extremely unlikely
“So I think that it's a great strategy, and it drives a lot of interesting things, but the odds of this coalescing are very low, and that's why this notion, and the lesson from Sony, or RCA before it, or Whirlpool, they're all there. Like, Nobody ever came to g…”
Evans: Tech companies pursue voice platforms due to smartphone platform envy
“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”
Evans: Machine learning will completely solve voice recognition errors
“And that does get fixed. That will absolutely get fixed because of machine learning.”
Evans: Non-technical people falsely assume narrow AI implies general intelligence
“Basic fallacy in sort of non-technical people looking at AI in any sense is you see the machine do something, and you think, well, for a human being to be able to do that, they would have to be able to do all these other things. Therefore, the machine must hav…”
Evans: Expecting voice assistants to become universal platforms is a blind alley
“Each one of the things that Alexa can do, somebody had to build, and that doesn't scale, and so the idea this becomes like a universal platform, or it's like it's the next smartphone, is a complete blind alley.”
Evans: Smart home ecosystems will always remain fragmented and messy
“The reality is you'll buy one thing now, and in five years' time, you'll buy another thing, and 15 years after that, so you'll have all these. And so this kind of brings us back to the stuff we were talking about at the beginning, which is you have the big com…”
Sinofsky: Samsung putting screens and ARM chips in everything is overkill
“Samsung makes screens, and they make arm chips, so they seem to decide that every little device has to have a screen with an arm chip in it, and that just seems like overkill.”
Evans: Ideal dishwashers should have no UI beyond a go button
“The ideal for a dishwasher, where you don't have to worry about, like, different fabrics, is absolutely, you should just shut the thing and press go, and that should be it, and there shouldn't be any settings at all, and the rest of it should be the chips prob…”
Sinofsky: Apple drives innovation by boldly cutting legacy ports from laptops
“You can actually be different, and this is something, of course, that Apple tends to do better than anyone, which is be minimal about things. Like, you know, if you're making a Windows laptop, it's, like, cool to continue to have all the legacy plugs and all o…”
Sinofsky: The lesson of Clippy is automation must be 100% accurate
“And this is, like, literally the biggest lesson from Microsoft Clippy, which was, like, automatic features and automation are all cool, except they kind of have to be right literally all of the time.”
Evans: Hardware is no longer the bottleneck; product definition is
“Previously, you'd have the vision of the thing you wanted, and there'd be like a 10 year march to get the technology to build it. Now all the technology is there for almost anything you can think of. And people are trying to work out, well, what is the thing y…”