The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

Echo is the speaker-like cylinder, and Alexa is its artificial intelligence, named after the library of Alexandria.42 Alexa is designed to operate like a personal communicator, enabling the user to call up music, search the web, and get answers to questions. Most of all, it takes gathering to the next level by ordering through powerful speech recognition software. Say, “Alexa, add Sensodyne to shopping cart” or (such a pain) push a Trojan Condoms Dash button43—and in an hour or less, it’s go time. And Alexa gets smarter every time you use it. That’s what the customer gets. For Amazon, the reward is greater: Amazon’s customers trust it so much that they’re allowing the company to listen in on their conversations and harvest their consumption data. This will give Amazon deeper penetration into the private lives and desires of consumers than any other company. In the short term, Go and Echo suggest that the company is headed toward zero-click ordering across its operations. Leveraging big data and unrivaled knowledge of consumer purchasing patterns, Amazon will soon meet your need for stuff, without the friction of deciding or ordering. I call this concept Prime Squared. You may need to calibrate every once in a while—less stuff when you go on vacation, more when you’re having people over, less Lindt Chocolate when you fall out of love with it—but everything else will operate on retail’s equivalent of fly-by-wire. Your order will arrive with an empty box; you’ll put the stuff...