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Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

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Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#231

Post by swozey »

paxys wrote: post #86

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…

With how much Amazon pricing fluctuates I definitely want to see the page before I buy.

y protein powder that was, I think $50s pre-2020 is now $80ish. Sigh. Goodbye Hydrowhey, back to the chalky stuff.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#232

Post by onion2k »

skellera wrote: post #70
arder wrote: post #44

That "Downstream impact" metric sounds like a big yikes. Massive incentives to game that metric and before you know it you've got 10 projects all claiming credit for some theoretical downstream impact all of which are actually just canabalizing existing revenue. Like, Amazon is doing $5Bn of revenue selling tide pods, the Alexa team make some claim about people's likeliness to order tide pods via the Alexa and before…

Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon. People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others. I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and tr…

Amazon is the same as Google, Meta, Twitter, etc in the sense that they have a couple of wildly profitable products that enables the company to 'play' at running some other businesses that might turn a profit eventually after investing fifty billion. For Amazon it's the retail business and AWS. For Google it's AdWords. For Meta it's Facebook Ads. These businesses will never die, or even face a threat to their futures, despite throwing billions at self-driving cars, AI, phones, VR, etc.

The only existential threat to FAANG companies is a shift in consumer behavior away from spending money on things they see ads for. That's quite unlikely.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#233

Post by pants2 »

S0y wrote: post #113

>Customers actually used Echo mostly for free apps such as setting alarms and checking the weather. “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” said a former senior employee. That's actually really funny to read. Just last night I was watching my brother cook and he asked Alexa to set a timer (It's pretty much the only thing he uses it for...) I jokingly said "You know, that's a really expen…

That's partly because all voice assistants have a feature discoverability problem. People have generally no idea what it can do unless they ask. And if new features are added, they won't know about those either. But at the bare minimum you know it has timers and weather.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#234

Post by brazzy »

alexathrowawa9 wrote: post #114

Throwaway here but I used to work in Alexa org at Amazon and was amazed by how big the org was (thousands and thousands of people) considering it doesn't seem to be a big revenue generator I remember constantly hearing about projects other teams were working on thinking "why would anyone use that" or "how would that ever make money" Just trying to shoehorn alexa into as many domains as possible It was like empire bui…

I guess that's what happens when you're generating absurd amounts of revenue and want to "reinvest" it all: anything that even vaguely smells of "innovation" gets money thrown at it like crazy, and you end up incentivizing bullshitting.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#235

Post by mvanbaak »

textlapse wrote: post #225

If Amazon (and Google and Apple) couldn’t figure out how to monetize a voice/chat ‘app’ after a decade of plowing money into it, how does the whole LLM market come to fruition? Genuinely curious as I see a similar trend: there is definite consumer interest, but just like ‘kitchen timers on Alexa’ what if the LLMs main use case is simply to generate funny memes and the most basic RAG? How does this manifest into a tri…

hype, marketing, investors spent millions so lets make it happen.

It feels a lot like the whole crypto thing

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#236

Post by 1970-01-01 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #76

Just an hour ago I asked Alexa "Is negative ten an even number?" and was shocked when it said "No, minus ten is a negative number and is not even" I asked again and the reply was exactly the same. Variations of the question still resulted in 'negative numbers cannot be even or odd' I checked again 20 minutes later and it then gave me correct answers to the exact same questions. I deeply want Alexa to fail as a produc…

Update: I asked again if -1000 is even or odd, and Alexa continues to think negative numbers can never be even or odd.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#237

Post by onion2k »

StressedDev wrote: post #204
wnc3141 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even if Amazon stagnates, servicing that core business at scale is a once in a generation moat.

Retail is extremely competitive. Amazon does not have the best prices, and has a horrible experience for shopping. It's basically a specialized search engine with lots of ads at this point. Also, the things which made Amazon shopping a no-brainer are gone. Items no longer always arrive within two days if you have Prime, there are lots of poor-quality items, and it's hard to find what you really want. Finally, it's ob…

Prime is Amazon's moat though. More than 100 million people subscribe to a service that locks them into choosing Amazon first. People with Prime choose Amazon over going to a physical store. It's what took Amazon out of being an e-commerce business and into being a retail business. Don't underestimate how important Prime is to Amazon - it's literally a vendor lock-in that generates billions directly through fees and tens of billions indirectly through additional sales.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#238

Post by mschuster91 »

booi wrote: post #220
crazygringo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a million times. I swear I will never understand why Amazon's supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster. Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there's a single listing for each book, and the price doesn't change much, just some discount from list. It works. But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it's utter chaos. Multiple listings…

It's ridiculous that I have to have a spreadsheet with pricing information and links for household goods just to spot check and make sure I'm getting the actual price per quantity that I want due to the multiple dynamic listings that change every day nightmare. Don't ask how many times I receive more or less than I thought I would or something came in 10 packages of 3 instead of 1 30x package.

Vote for politicians that campaign on consumer protection legislation.

Here in Europe, it's been mandatory to show a price related to a reasonable common base point (e.g. liter, kilogram, piece, usage-unit for laundry detergent) adjacent to the actual product's price for many years now. You can go and use 1/10/100 grams/milliliters though for small scale packages where that is reasonably common (e.g. spices), and that's it.

Fun fact, that piece of legislation significantly contributed to Brexit propaganda, the campaign was based on "the EU wants to take away our pints/stones/pounds/whatnot".

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#239

Post by dredmorbius »

wnc3141 wrote: post #72
skellera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downstream impact is gamed internally at Amazon. People crucified Sears for making teams compete internally but that’s literally what’s happening at Amazon at a larger scale. Teams and orgs regularly push back against helping each other. Will not waste resources to help others. I don’t believe Amazon has a good outlook over 5 years unless they get lucky with random bets. They no longer innovate, they just copy and tr…

I think even if Amazon stagnates, servicing that core business at scale is a once in a generation moat.

I mean, Sears is still around, if barely.

Other retail giants had been seen as walking dead for decades in the 1970s and 1980s before finally falling.

Though drivers then and now may differ. Old-school retail benefitted from purchase contracts (dedicated suppliers, corporate buyers), as well as service contracts (for purchased kit). Back when durable goods might actually last 15, 20, 30 years, this meant that at least a trickle of income was still coming in. Sears rather famously botched this hard when it used its automotive repair unit to commit nationwide fraud, see in 1992: "Accusation Of Fraud At Sears" https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-fr...>.

How durable Amazon might prove under similar mismanagement in the globalised Internet age is ... an interesting question.

Re: Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

#240

Post by swozey »

AlexandrB wrote: post #106
bluSCALE4 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.

Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials.

I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such incredibly healthy options as (only) Sunny Delite and Tropicana for orange juice, massive boxes of Lays chips and cheezits and popcorn. I saw so few items that weren't basically boxes of corn syrup and sugar in some form. There's so many healthier snacks nowadays.

I didn't expect a complete grocery experience but I was expecting it to have far more healthy options these days, or even just more options in general.

I don't eat any of this stuff. I guess you're a costco family or not. I was a costco family as a kid and had to learn how to eat healthy after shoving soda down all day long my entire childhood.

edit: Yeah I'm looking just at their juice section here and there's not a single less-sugar option just as an example https://www.costco.com/juice.html.

Although, damn, $18.99 for 24 ojs is good. But both options are so disgustingly sweet. I had a single OJ for $7 from einsteins yesterday.

edit: Go down the orange juice flavor pack "Why do they all taste different" rabbit hole with me.... https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mpdop/e...

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