But there’s no point in giving them away for free unless future value can be extracted from those devices. It’s not a service like Spotify where you’ll get a month free to demo/“get hooked” then start paying the a subscription fee. Maybe the value for Google is word of mouth advertising? Data collection to improve future versions?

This is a platform war. Largest installed base gets the most integrations. Then you add on ways to monetize the platform.

Integrations aren't nearly the barrier to entry apps are so it's not very platform-like in that sense.

That's exactly what they are. How well can you access your music library from the platform? Control your lights? Ask about the state of your car? Your thermostat? Your shopping account at Amazon? Access to the Google knowledge graph? Your Gmail inbox, with the inferred fight information and calendar data?

Now imagine coming into this arena with none of those integrations. Your system can answer some questions about the weather. It can tell you that your Imap mail account has 3 new messages. Everything else, you've got to do the engineering work yourself to integrate, while Google and Amazon just publish APIs.

They are just a lot less work (the platform provider does the bulk of it) so it's not that hard for third parties to support a couple of competing platforms. The barrier part is much less barrier-y than, say, desktop apps or smartphone apps. The space is also smaller and more constrained - nobody is going to invent an 'integration' as popular as, say, a snapchat.

For now most apps are pretty simple, but with better conversation skills (comprehension, keeping context, etc), developers might write some pretty advanced ones. And if one platform has infrastructure that can offload that and convert it into simple APIs, I can see it being a stronger lock-in than smartphone apps.

Agreed. Let's remember how simple apps used to be in the first home computers. $5 on a single floppy, mostly to convert duplication costs. As the market developed, they got more sophisticated and became a larger moat.

I think it'd be hard for anyone to remember that since it didn't really happen. Gates was complaining people were pirating his $75 BASIC pretty much right off the bat, for instance.

The search data alone is valuable, even if they never advertise through the device.

If this was Walmart's home speaker people would call their strategy predatory pricing, but since it's Google no one seems to care.

Walmart competes with Mom and Pop grocery stores. Google is competing with god damn Amazon. And possibly future startups that might otherwise try to enter the smart speaker space, but decide not to because they can't compete at that price point. In which case, great...that is not a case of a large corporation leveraging their size/position to harm customers.

(I work at Amazon)

I think you could argue Walmart was primarily competing with mom and pop stores a decade ago (though really other large supermarkets at that point), but they are most certainly competing with amazon today.

How can preventing competition be great? If innovative startups are prevented from entering the market because of predatory pricing, it does harm customers.

Because human attention is scarce, it's infeasible for them to care until there is a real risk of such behavior becoming a problem.

People would suddenly start to care if the entity enjoys a large enough market share to make them a monopoly.