Why is cortana important? They will be competing with similar free products that are hardware subsidized or ad subsidized. Where and how does this turn into income? msft just sold off a big chunk of their ad operations, and almost certainly will not be selling large amounts of hardware. Xbox one has sold ~10mm units, and as a road into the living room has been mostly a complete failure. That's neither large enough for ad subsidies or hardware subsidies to work. What am I missing?
Because Cortana is the manifestation of engineering capacity to crunch user data to make deeper decisions and better offerings to end users. That capacity is why Google, Apple and now MSFT are all chasing the ability to do voice, because that means they can do highly sophisticated data crunching on their massive computational capacity.
It aligns directly with each's desire to deliver products and services (yes, even Apple - music suggestions is one example) rather than just be a hardware/software retailer.
Cortana, siri and Google now are the future of advertising and sales. "Okay Google, order me a pizza". "Hey siri, call me a cab". "Cortana, I need restaurant reservations at 8. Something nice".
The virtual assistant's job is to pick a supplier and spend your money on your behalf. Everybody wants a piece of that.
Maybe - but users won't go for it if there's a principal-agent problem. Google and Apple will face a temptation to choose suppliers that pay the highest commissions and they'll have to overcome that temptation if they want their services to take off.
They won't get users to say "Siri, book me a flight" if it books you a $500 American Airlines flight when you wanted a $300 Southwest flight.
