Microsoft has continued to waffle around how exactly it plans to position Cortana. But CEO Satya Nadella gave the clearest explanation so far: Cortana will be a skill, not a head-to-head competitor with Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri.
Microsoft officials have spent the past year working on the public repositioning of Cortana from standalone digital assistant to more of an assistance aide. But it wasn’t until this week that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella officially confirmed what we’ve already seen happening: Cortana is going to be an app, or skill, not a standalone assistant like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri. Nadella spoke to a select group of journalists on the Microsoft campus earlier this week. Thanks to a transcript from one of those invited (which will cost you $10 if you aren’t already a subscriber to the daily Stratechery newsletter), we know that Nadella was asked about Microsoft’s aspirations in the consumer space. « One thing that I feel like at Microsoft we made a bunch of mistakes by just saying let’s just enter every category, just because we’re a software company, » he told attendees.
