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Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#111

Post by jnsie »

losteric wrote: post #91
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see the path to profitability for Alexa. Like, sure, it's neat, but how does it make any money? Do they sell the devices at a profit? Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?

> Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise? That seems reasonable. Customers can order directly through the device ("Alexa, order some toilet paper"), that's low friction and lets Amazon rank options to their benefit. Plus regularly using Alexa keeps Amazon primed (no pun intended) in the customer's mind so next time t…

> at this point no one in my technical circle has proprietary "smart" home automation devices anymore

What are they using now, if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#112

Post by mr_gibbins »

djbusby wrote: post #89
mr_gibbins wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not strictly true. I examined a master's degree thesis last semester where the student proved conclusively that Alexa devices are periodically spamming bursts of data back to Amazon HQ even when not woken. Beyond a heartbeat, too - MBs of data, not KBs. No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.

So, mitmproxy that traffic and see what it is?

Scope of his work didn't go that far, he looked at several devices and Alexa was notably chatty. He was measuring for abnormal data bursts from IoT home devices - included things like smart bulbs etc.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#113

Post by fnordpiglet »

paxys wrote: post #81
noobermin wrote: post #16

There has been a lot of talk about a correction coming and a bubble bursting specifically in tech for years now. Is this it?

People have been saying "the tech bubble is going to burst" since like 2011. The current round of job cuts and stock drops puts the industry back to ~mid 2020 levels. So it is definitely a correction, but hardly world ending.

Realistically they’ve been saying this since the 1950s

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#114

Post by softwaredoug »

green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

I never got the value of voice devices.

In my experience you learn how to make them do 1-2 things. You learn a few patterns. But beyond that, even if they work 95% of the time, that 1 in 20 is annoying enough to make me not want to use it and just push a few buttons.

Maybe case in point is using voice in the car. It should be the best, most obvious application. Yet aside from maybe texting, people want things like Apple CarPlay - a big touchscreen - not voice commands.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#115

Post by forbiddenvoid »

__s wrote: post #83
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't see the path to profitability for Alexa. Like, sure, it's neat, but how does it make any money? Do they sell the devices at a profit? Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise?

It's an ads vector Eventually people will say "Alexa buy my groceries" Alexa will buy from the highest bidder

This has been promised for a long time, but from my perspective, I don't really see this getting any closer to reality.

But for what it's worth, I think there's a conflict of interest here. No one is going to believe that Amazon won't prioritize Fresh or Whole Foods for these orders - even if they don't.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#116

Post by amflare »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #75
mjr00 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.

...what is it? I really can't see a difference.

Hourly workers (unskilled labor) are flexible and cutting hours is almost as easy to reverse as it is to do in the first place. Cutting salaried employees (skilled labor) is a much harder and expensive decision to reverse. So doing so means that there is either a consistent issue that is not getting resolved, thus making them not worth the expense, or things are about to get so bad that the company feels that the savings are worth the loss of skilled labor.

And clarify the difference between skilled and unskilled labor (which might make this make more sense), this is not a description of the work itself, but rather the barrier of entry. Anyone can be taken off the street and trained into an "unskilled" position with relative ease. That is not true for "skilled" positions though. Which is why Amazon's decision to start cutting corporate jobs represents a fundamental shift in their path going forward.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#117

Post by bonestamp2 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #47
green-eclipse wrote: post #25

> In 2018, Echo and Alexa lost about $5 billion, said a person with knowledge of the finances. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was notably more restrained than past years when it had featured zany products like a sticky note printer and $1,000 home robot. $5B loss from one business line is a lot. Maybe this manner of investment inspired Zuck on the metaverse.

How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs. Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?

In addition to the other replies, I'll add that they have a new frontier for Alexa in the works and while I don't think the hardware has to be all that exotic, the development effort will be. I know they're at least a year into development on that, and those costs will be high with nothing public to show for it (yet).

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#118

Post by pkulak »

jnsie wrote: post #111
losteric wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does usage of the devices lead to increased sales on Amazon.com? Are those sales that wouldn't have taken place on the app/website otherwise? That seems reasonable. Customers can order directly through the device ("Alexa, order some toilet paper"), that's low friction and lets Amazon rank options to their benefit. Plus regularly using Alexa keeps Amazon primed (no pun intended) in the customer's mind so next time t…

> at this point no one in my technical circle has proprietary "smart" home automation devices anymore What are they using now, if you don't mind me asking?

Home Assistant almost goes without saying at this point.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#119

Post by zackmorris »

Something I've never understood about layoffs is that large corporations have nearly unlimited borrowing power. Amazon's market cap is just over $1 trillion, so it could probably borrow up to ~10x or $10 trillion against that (almost half the US GDP).

Isn't that enough money to keep employees through a downturn?

The flip side is that individuals have almost no borrowing power. The bottom 40% of the US population has a negative net worth, so can't borrow anything:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/02/the-costs-of-...

To me, this looks like evidence that profit comes from offloading externalities onto the public.

Ordinarily, workers could find work at other companies. But because companies are so large now, they have effective monopolies in markets like shipping. So layoffs could be used as a signal to bring companies up on antitrust charges.

Re: Amazon is said to plan to lay off thousands of employees

#120

Post by bonestamp2 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #87
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs. Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?

They likely sell them at a loss. Long-term, the hope is probably that the halo effect - "oh, I have Alexa, so I'll buy a Ring security system" and "Alexa, buy cat litter" sort of stuff - balances it out nicely.

Definitely. They have bundles with their Blink security cameras, which can be viewed on the Alex Show models.
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