Microsoft Cortana: First Casualty of the Digital-Assistant Wars?

Not all digital assistants are going to survive.

Amazon has Alexa, Google has its voice-activated Assistant, and Apple has Siri. Anxious to compete in the growing digital-assistant wars, Microsoft rolled out Cortana — but that might have been a case of too little, too late.

Without a popular smartphone OS to double as a platform for its assistant (as Apple has with Siri) or a burgeoning ecosystem of “smart” home devices (like Amazon and Google), Microsoft has been reduced to pushing Cortana as part of the Windows 10 search experience. On paper, that must have seemed like a smart move; given the user base for Windows, there was a chance that Cortana could have gained significant adoption.

However, Microsoft is separating Cortana from search, moving it into the Windows Store as a standalone app. That might give Microsoft the opportunity to update Cortana more often (as opposed to waiting for new Windows 10 upgrades), but it reinforces the idea that the assistant is increasingly adrift. Cortana isn’t on a plethora of smart devices; it’s disappearing from the Xbox; and it’s no longer baked right into Windows.

That doesn’t mean Cortana is in imminent danger of outright cancelation.“I think that what we’ve been really working on over…