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Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of smart home devices grows.

Overall, 75 percent of security device sales include at least one smart home device, according to Parks Associates.

Smart speaker shipments totaled 32 million units in 2017, 300 percent up year over year, Strategy Analytics found. Google and Amazon accounted for 90 percent of sales. Google's market share increased to about 35 percent in Q4, while Amazon's share fell to about 50 percent. Meanwhile, there were a host of new entrants to the market.

From the article "Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain" by Richard Adhikari. 

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