141–150 of 871 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the content.
That's not a revenue problem, that's an over-hiring useless employees problem.
-Gerald Wineberg
We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream impact.
It takes a LOT of $179/year subscriptions to pay the salaries of 10,000 engineers. Especially since a lot of that subscription revenue for music will go to licensing the content.
The entire business model was people being willing to buy things “site unseen”. This is not how people shop. Seeing is an important part of the experience. Also, these losses are staggering. And yet they are still selling these things. I just bought one for the kids dorm room.
Heh - that eggcorn is actually applicable in this case, as they have not seen the Amazon website.
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…
And I'm not certain, but I believe that sellers game this system- you can see certain things that make sense to order on a recurring schedule have unconscionable prices. Once you have a certain threshold of recurring orders, why not increase the price 10x? Especially because Amazon puts so many dark patterns in the way of a user canceling a "subscription".
Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
Can't you just ask it to set the volume to a specific volume as a percentage, like 38%? This works on Google Home. In the Google ecosystem, it also usually works if you ask it to raise the volume by a small increment like 5%. (Other times, this sets the volume to 5%.) I think you also used to be able to ask the device to raise the volume 'a bit' or 'a lot', for 5% or 20% respectively, but that stopped working a long…
I still cannot believe Amazon convinced people to install 1984 surveillance in their homes, much less pay for it, for whatever trivial conveniences the stupid thing offers. It's not Amazon's fault but it's just strange to me how sideways our culture is that it's considered normal to let a corporation have unfettered access to your private space and pay them for being there. I get the tradeoff with smartphones...at le…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech companies have to cannibalize existing revenue to stay relevant long-term. If you don’t cannibalize your own revenue streams, then some other company will figure out how to take your revenue. ( Innovator’s Dilemma takes this concept and stretches it out across a whole book.) That said… Alexa seems like such a waste. It’s like Sony making an MP3 player. Sony Electronics was never going to make a good MP3 player a…
I don’t Sony Electronics can blame the music side of the house for Memory Stick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
The number is not 0% either.
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision. This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (…
Now I have to be paranoid about checking product details like if there are 3rd party sellers using FBA which potentially signals fakes. There’s no longer blind trust in Amazon for a lot of customers. I can’t just mindlessly buy stuff with the hope that Amazon customer service can take care of anything going wrong like they did years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To build on the Costco analogy: for any given product category they typically only have three specific options: good, better, best. I could tell Costco bot that I need AA batteries and it would ask me if I prefer Duracell, Kirkland brand, or cheapest. I trust that either of them will be plenty good, so I would say cheapest. Amazon has a vastly different experience with thousands of indistinguishable Chinese knockoffs…
To add to your point, one can't even pick out a brand-name product directly from Amazon's website and be sure of getting the real thing.
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
Until they figure out price stability for staple goods then nobody will use this. Hell I don't even use Subscribe and Save for the same reason.