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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

#201

Post by achow »

piva00 wrote: post #193
achow wrote: post #187

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…

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…

Good point.

However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).

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

#202

Post by freeone3000 »

rdl wrote: post #179
SkyPuncher wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my compliant with all of this voice control stuff. The dev teams are so damn focused on being able to answer some esoteric query that you're asking as joke, they forget that you only want to do like 5 basic things: * Set an alarm/reminder * Read then send a text message (while driving). It doesn't even have to be good. Just something that I can send while driving. * Maybe.....maybe ask for the weather.…

I wonder how many of those could be run device-local on 2-4 year old smartphone equivalent hardware (so, something you could build today and sell for <$300 as an Echo-equivalent) with some kind of trust-minimized cloud backend (or homekit, etc. integration for local device control).

$300 is way, way too much. The echo is $50 base, and usually on sale or discount. It has to be cheaper than an RPi to even come close to matching the price.

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

#204

Post by gscott »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #63
kennu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has a white paper on how it's supposed to work. According to the paper, yes, it's technically listening to audio, but storing it only in a temporary RAM buffer until it detects the wake word. I'm personally mostly interested in what gets recorded or sent to the cloud. "Echo devices use on-device keyword spotting designed to detect when a customer says the wake word. This technology inspects acoustic patterns i…

They could easily push custom firmware to "persons of interest" (ever criticize your government?) and nobody would ever know.

This has been done with cars with the inbuilt microphone for onstar.

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

#205

Post by piva00 »

achow wrote: post #201
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…

Good point. However, supporting all the 'partner devices' comes with associated cost in terms of engg' development and support (somewhat like what Android must be dealing with. Android division in Google would not be a low cost division I'm sure).

It surely does, I work at a place where we also have to deal with multiple partner integrations across multiple vendors and types of devices for our products, there's some overhead for it but not nearly as much as one would expect.

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

#206

Post by creshal »

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…

Amazon seems to be lacking in direction much more than talent anyway. There's still no way to limit the search to products that are both in stock and ship to the country I told Amazon to use for calculating shipping rates; while the flood of Chinese scammers would be a difficult problem to solve, increasingly I can't even get scammed because I can't find anything that pretends to ship to my address.

It's really baffling how Amazon is actively getting worse to buy from, and sees no problem with it.

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

#207

Post by creshal »

vishnugupta wrote: post #171

I'll add little bit of context from Kindle Reader which was developed while I was at Amazon. Though I was in no way involved with it I frequently interacted with senior folks who were. For first few years, Kindle Reader was a massive sink hole at multiple levels. There was this humongous R&D cost, hardware and software. On a recurring basis Amazon absorbed cellular data charges. Remember this was in early 2008 so cel…

> My suspicion is execs expected Alexa ecosystem to follow Kindle's trajectory of success which doesn't seem to have materialised.

I think that sentence encapsulates the problem well: Kindle could succeed as a product with a very simple KPI (ramp up economies of scale until you make a profit per book sold), while Alexa has to develop some nebulous "ecosystem" that nobody is quite sure what it could possibly look like.

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

#208

Post by jhoelzel »

i actually like this. The tech had so much potential, but instead of going the way of the seatbelt, they want the way of the bezos and thus Im not even sad to see alexa go.

Please write it off, free the patents and let people who actually care about it take the helm.

Drop the money into home assistant and let them write special integrations just for you. Be -the company- invested in open source

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

#209

Post by Rebelgecko »

b112 wrote: post #196
somenameforme wrote: post #48

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…

Amazon used to be happy to price match themselves within a month or so of a purchase, or do things like let keep a cheap item you wanted to return.

My guess is that they did some A/B testing and found that the "irrational" behavior actually saves them money. In your example, if 50% of people don't bother going through the return process they still come out ahead.

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

#210

Post by tpxl »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #175
antifa wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they do this on purpose to frustrate you into spending more.

Maybe, but it’s a legitimately hard problem. Sort by lowest price legitimately means show the lowest price item first, even if it’s less relevant. Based on other search systems I have worked with, they probably have an initial fast filter that limits the items from the entire inventory to a loosely matching set (erring on the side of including irrelevant items). Then a more intelligent and expensive ranking system wo…

> erring on the side of including irrelevant items

This is the reason for this problem. When searching for 'cat' and sorting by lowest price, the first promoted item doesn't contain the word cat and neither does the first actual result (but they are cat items).

If they didn't hoist 'legitimately hard' problems onto themselves, maybe they wouldn't need to solve them.

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