Alexa and Cortana Teamed Up, But Consumer Tech Is Still Stuck in an Ecosystem War. The voice interfaces Cortana and Alexa will soon be able to activate each other for functions that one does better than the other, Amazon and Microsoft announced today. It’s the kind of cooperation that we don’t see enough between the Big Five, or really any company that’s grown out of its “desperately cobble together partnerships so we look relevant” phase and into its “abandon all cooperation that doesn’t lock customers into our shitty ecosystem” phase. Cortana and Alexa’s competitors, Google Assistant and Siri, won’t be integrating any time soon. As Gizmodo notes, Google and Apple have far more users locked into their ecosystems, so they have far less incentive to cooperate with competing systems. By combining forces, Microsoft and Amazon are admitting they’ve lost the war for mobile, (the dominant user interface now), and holding onto their own core competencies: Microsoft for business communication, Amazon for consumption.

Meanwhile, though Google Assistant runs on i. OS, it’s very limited and can’t be activated without opening an app. Siri won’t run at all on Android. And even on its native platform, Siri won’t control best- in- class apps like Spotify, Gmail, or Google Maps. Google Assistant is more flexible, but it can’t order things on Amazon the way Alexa can. Amazon still hasn’t released its promised Apple TV app, so Prime customers have to stream Transparent and Curb Your Enthusiasm from their phones. There are no plans for an Amazon app on the Chromecast, or for Spotify on Apple TV.

Subscribe and SAVE, give a gift subscription or get help with an existing subscription by clicking the links below each cover image. David Twohy was born on October 18, 1955 in Los Angeles County, California, USA as David Neil Twohy. He is a writer and director, known for The Fugitive (1993), Pitch. What we do in a nutshell? We make it possible for your to watch TV without paying for cable! InformationWeek.com connects the business technology community. Award-winning news and analysis for enterprise IT.

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You can retreat to a third- party media player like Roku, but then you can’t play videos purchased through i. Tunes without a wonky file conversion.

Starting at the end of this month, Amazon will no longer sell the Chromecast or Apple TV. You could choose Google, and miss out on Apple’s slick interface and seamless desktop- to- mobile integration. Or choose Apple, lose a lot of third- party functionality, and get locked into increasingly bizarre design choices (your Lightning headphones won’t work on your laptop) and inferior software like Apple Maps, Mail, and Calendar. On desktop, choose Windows and miss out on that same integration, or choose Apple, pay more for the same computing power, and get your computer games a year late.

Straddle ecosystems, running the Google Suite instead of MS Office and hooking your i. Phone up to your PC or your Android to your Mac. Run Spotify, buy an Echo, and live with their limited capabilities. Maybe even run Excel on OS X. All but the most basic users reach outside their main ecosystem at some point. Install Linux on your Chromebook, jailbreak your i. Phone, run Cortana on your Fit.

Bit, hack your Echo to play Tidal, and write a viral Medium post encouraging people to “unplug.”In the short term, all these companies have good reasons to lock up their platforms wherever they still think they can steal market share from the others, and wherever they would rather focus resources on improving their own service instead of handing millions of customers to their competitors through a partnership. But in the long term, this lock- in keeps the Big Five from innovating, their products leaning on the crutch of the ecosystem, alienating customers who will then abandon the ecosystem for third- party services like Spotify, Dropbox, Whats. App, 1. Password, and Overcast. OS has a bunch of great podcast managers these days, but after testing all of them, our favorite. Macs and PCs didn’t always run so many of the same apps. Internet Explorer and Netscape were much more mutually exclusive than Chrome and Safari. And for a while, your Internet came in flavors of AOL, Prodigy, or Compu.

Serve. Even Android and i. OS used to have zero apps in common. But each time, interoperability won out, bringing (most of) each platform’s strengths to everyone. But things could get worse before they get better. The Big Five are all racing to win at online payments, wearables, AI, AR, VR, smart homes, smart cars, and the growing Internet of Things. And as long as each company thinks it can win, it will try to push out the others instead of playing nice. Eventually there will be winners and losers, or decentralized cooperation.

Every now and then, a new protocol will open up that’s as decentralized as email or HTTP. And the giants of the day will move onto a new fight. In the meantime, there’s nearly always some way to force the ecosystems to play together, at the expense of simplicity and not having your shit constantly break. There’s always some third option to jimmy into the gap and outperform all the defaults. And that’s what Lifehacker’s all about.

The Boston Red Sox Have Finally Found a Good Reason to Own an Apple Watch. Smartwatches have long felt like a gadget in search of a purpose. However, it seems the Boston Red Sox have finally discovered one thing they are actually good at: cheating. According to complaint filed by New York Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman and later corroborated by Major League Baseball, it seems the Boston Red Sox used the messaging function on Apple Watches to steal signs between Yankees pitchers and catchers and then relay that info to its batters. According to the The New York Times, the Red Sox told league investigators that team personnel had been instructed to monitor instant- replay video and then send the signs to trainers in the dugout via their Apple Watches. 1080P Hd Video Download Ride Along 2 (2016) here. The trainers would then pass on the info to the players, thus giving them an advantage before an incoming pitch. Stealing signs isn’t anything new for baseball, but the use of an Apple Watch is a pretty dastardly use of modern technology.

Last season, the Los Angeles Dodgers were found guilty of cheating when the team used laser rangefinders to position its players in the outfield. Of course, in true Red Sox fashion, the team countered by filing a (probably bogus) complaint alleging that the Yankees used a camera from its YES television network to steal signs as well. Red Sox fans have also seemed to have latched on the Apple Watch, not because of the tech itself, but because of their never- ending inferiority complex that flares up anytime the Yankees are mentioned. One Bostonian even went so far as to say “This is the first time I’ve ever wanted to wear an Apple Watch.” I guess congratulations are in order to Tim Cook and company for finding a way to cross over into a new demographic. As someone who went to college in Boston, this kind of vitriol is pervasive across the entire region.