261–270 of 378 posts
We're heavy Alexa users. Since we are a family, the #1 use case is of course farting noises, but other than that, we use it to: - Set ourselves reminders - Manage the family calendar (reading out of reminders, reading the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling events) - Manage the family todo list - Manage the shopping list - Read out weather information including rain, to help us decide on what to wear outside - Some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People want voice control because they see it in movies and TV. But what they forget that the only reason movies and TV have it in the first place is because that way the audience hears what the character wants! It's not because it's actually a better interface - because it's not! Same with glass interfaces with no buttons - they make them because they are cheaper, not because it's better. But they look really cool,…
I get your point > Same with glass interfaces with no buttons - they make them because they are cheaper, not because it's better. But are you saying current smartphones are somehow worse than button phones? I'll pass on that. And they ain't cheaper too :)
We're heavy Alexa users. Since we are a family, the #1 use case is of course farting noises, but other than that, we use it to: - Set ourselves reminders - Manage the family calendar (reading out of reminders, reading the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling events) - Manage the family todo list - Manage the shopping list - Read out weather information including rain, to help us decide on what to wear outside - Some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardware is very expensive. Alexa dot is $14 on Amazon.com right now, i bet they are selling it at a loss for that price.
I bet that’s at cost tbh. You’d be surprised how cheap things have gotten. However, r&d and every single Alexa request costs money. So from day one, it’s losing money.
I like voice command but Alexa is just not that great. Simple example: there are rooms and each device (e.g. echo or smart lights switch) is assigned to a room. I have multiple echos and multiple smart light switches throughout the house. I come to a room and say “turn on lights”. I would expect Alexa to turn on lights in that room. Sound simple? Nope. Alexa replies “there are multiple devices named lights, which one…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2020 - It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/amazon-sees-a…
The article says that the hardware was generally sold at cost, though.
The market penetration is therefore finite, limited to geeks and early adopters. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't consider profitability more thoroughly when they started with Alexa. It must have cost them $100 billion by now.
Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…
Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? Amazon seems to be a very poorly run company. So many issues with search, with spam, with listings, and here's another data point... Just bought a laptop. Waited until it was on sale, after doing Linux compatible research. It shows up. 3 days later, it is even more on sale. This is a product sold and shipped by a…
I’d say that Amazon has the data to determine if it’s more profitable to give the customer a credit or have them ship and return it.
So while annoying, I’d say that scale is probably why they are doing this seemingly unintuitive thing.
Perhaps a silly question, but can somebody describe how they might lose $10 billion on Alexa in one year? I don't understand the math. That's enough to pay 33,000 employees $330k a year, or some recombination of such. I don't think the real numbers come even remotely close to that. So it presumably has to be hardware costs, but Alexa is software, and they have vertical integration of all servers which presumably woul…
I don't understand the point about vertical integration. Amazon use their own hardware and services internally and AWS makes a ton of money of course. But if you were accounting for the profit or loss of Alexa specifically, of course you would account for all the AWS services used at the price they are sold for externally.
Having spent tens of billions on something that doesn't add up to the bottom line doesn't go well with shareholders, especially when there's no prospect that it ever will.