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Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#321

Post by dylan604 »

subpixel wrote: post #85
enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there. I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

>Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore,

on HN.

I know many many many people that don't give one iota about the things you and I might care about regarding Amazon's "quality". All they care about is that they thing they want is available, fast/free shipping, and at a price they are okay with paying. They don't know one thing about comingling inventory, they don't care about fake reviews, or any of the other things discussed frequently here.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#322

Post by genewitch »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #158
enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

I find that Amazon is still okay if I already know specifically what I'm trying to order. But browsing, yeah that shit is a nightmare.

i like going through the black friday and "cyber monday" pages, there's usually about 60 pages of junk. I don't think i've ever bought anything. Interesting to see what amazon wants to get rid of in their warehouses, though.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#323

Post by mabbo »

wepple wrote: post #224
mabbo wrote: post #29

What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff. Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulf…

> All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. This is how you kill a tech company: stop innovating and fall back to simple “maximize revenue, cut expenses” MBA theory

Fine, forget putting those people to work on things that make money- have them innovate on 100 other projects instead of just this one that doesn't make money.

Amazon's innovation age is dead, imho. They are the Day 2 company that Jeff Bezos always warned about.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#324

Post by commandlinefan »

29athrowaway wrote: post #80
thepasswordis wrote: post #28

I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is: Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights! That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish th…

I use Alexa for everything. - To ask for the weather, weather alerts, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed - To ask about outdoor air quality, indoor air quality (requires air quality monitors) - As a baby monitor (crying detector routine) - To know when to empty the dehumidifier bucket (humidity > 60% routine) - To know when someone left the AC fan off (high CO2 routine) - To know when to open the window (hi…

I could never get used to the thing. I got one for free and I went ahead and hooked it up - every once in a while I ask it to play some music, but for the most part, I'm just aware of it because my daughter has a friend named Alexa and I have to be careful not to say her name or else the Amazon device will wake up.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#325

Post by HDThoreaun »

scott_w wrote: post #274
HDThoreaun wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably means Alexa loses $10 billion instead of $9.5 or whatever and has to fire some more people

MMAesawy gave the correct answer. It makes it clear what Alexa is really costing Amazon in an format that's easy to interpret. This is how most companies handle "internal purchases" from another business unit that also sells that product externally. Consider it this way: if Alexa doesn't buy that capacity, someone else could, so it's important to capture this opportunity cost. It's not perfect, however. I've seen exa…

Sure I was talking about what it means for alexa to not get the discount netflix gets. Obviously they need to account for the resources they use.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#326

Post by subpixel »

dylan604 wrote: post #321
subpixel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there. I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

>Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, on HN. I know many many many people that don't give one iota about the things you and I might care about regarding Amazon's "quality". All they care about is that they thing they want is available, fast/free shipping, and at a price they are okay with paying. They don't know one thing about comingling inventory, they don't care about fake reviews, or any of the other things…

Everyone trusts Amazon until they have a horrible experience.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#327

Post by genewitch »

thehappypm wrote: post #304
edgyquant wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the result of a propped up economy avoiding recessions at all cost. These large conglomerates are completely out of touch and money has been so cheap they were not really competing for or providing good services.

Why does everyone have an obsession with “cheap money”? You still need to pay a loan back, can reduced interest on a loan really prop up a company up? I feel like that vastly overstates the impact of interest costs on business’s bottom lines

"cheap money" lets you buy users. Netflix "allowed" people not paying the bill to use netflix accounts of those who did, Amazon sold devices at cost to get market share, uber et al hemorrhaged money to become ubiquitous as "taxi", and so on.

When money isn't cheap anymore, and you have to start showing a profit to get more money, the screws turn and users get squeezed. Merely showing a profit doesn't mean anything if you can't afford to do R&D without funding. Or, for a manufacturing perspective, your factory turns a profit, but you need to borrow money to buy a million dollar machine. The more it costs to borrow that money, the worse it gets for your customers - either because you use the older machines and make inferior product, or you have to raise your prices so the loan doesn't eat in to your profits as much.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#328

Post by ahaferburg »

thisOtterBeGood wrote: post #266
lsh123 wrote: post #95

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…

The "light on in current room" works for me. Maybe you have "overloaded" the "light" name.

Also add "at the present time, in this version of the multiverse", just to be sure it has enough context.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#329

Post by HDThoreaun »

michaelt wrote: post #279
sokoloff wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s got to be at least $5-7 to take my payment, pick, pack, and deliver it.

I can get a wifi-enabled microcontroller delivered from China for $3.40 [1] including payment, picking, packing and delivery. And the product is at least $1 of that price. I find it hard to believe Amazon is spending more than $2 on payment and delivery. [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004563128378.html

China subsidizes mail to the US. Amazon has to pay for all their logistics without government support.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#330

Post by canes123456 »

ben174 wrote: post #280
piva00 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa-powered does not necessarily mean Alexa devices made by Amazon though. For example: I own a multiroom speaker setup not made by Amazon that is Alexa-enabled, all speakers could run Alexa if I had set them up for it (which I won't, ever), and they're very likely counted on this metric. I can remember a multitude of other speakers and devices with an Alexa-enabled badge on their packaging that aren't made by Amaz…

Assuming you're referring to Sonos -- while they were once the best, they seem to just not work well anymore. I'm lucky if I can get it to function correctly. I've observed my brother's Chromecast whole-home audio which cost him a fraction of the price and has a ton more variety - and I'm thinking I may ditch my Sonos setup.

My Sonos speakers has been kind of buggy but I also have a brand new google home and it is not any better. I am thinking the blame is on google assistant. Google assistant seems to do a much better job understanding me but is inconsistent with nearly identical input. Alexa seems to be worse but is at least consistent.
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