291–298 of 298 posts
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There's a big difference between reducing the number of hourly workers (warehouse, drivers) and cutting 10,000 corporate jobs.
Amazon has something like 100k corporate employees, and their URA targets force managers to PIP approximately 6% of the corporate employees every year, so going from 6% to 10% isn’t exactly a massive change.
It is if made overnight!
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> that someone's Christmas might be not as expected. You should have sympathy for PEOPLE. Every one of the PEOPLE effected by any lay off or industry change is a person. It could be your relative, it could be you, ti could be me. Let's get out of the "I don't feel too bad for that person that's not me" and try to have compassion for fellow humans. edit: spelling typo
His post did seem to have sympathy, directed more at those that have a lot less than a 200k tc.
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There was the dot com bubble burst in 2000, so there has actually been one. A few years after the 2008 crash sounds about right to when people started talking about tech bubbles again to me.
All the signs were there for everyone to see in the 2000 Dotcom Dotbomb. The root problem was a bunch of investors wildly investing in crappy tech companies, like tinder for cats. There were toxic assets, huge and publicly visible waste, low product output. This time, there is a lot more growth from many companies but we also see the results of that work, products and services exist as a result. There is waste but no…
> 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 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?
Their actual purpose(s) will be emergent and are still being discovered.
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I'm sure in its peak IBM employed way more than that including their India and China teams. EDIT: found a source, 130K in india in 2017... == 33% of workforce "Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India — about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM’s businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to p…
Yeah I mentioned US for that reason. If you include the Indian outsourcing shops then clearly there would be numerous. Honesty though calling them developers is a bit too much. Most of them are used as benchwarmers to inflate numbers and get deals.
> 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 Ap…
What do dedicated hardware devices like Alexa add above and beyond that? They have a nicer speaker for playing music, but there's a whole ecosystem of bluetooth speakers you can use your phone with. They can control smart lightbulbs which I think phones don't have the right antenna for... but it feels like that could be solved by a $20 Chromecast-like dongle that your phone talks to over wifi. Is there anything else left to justify separate hardware, especially hardware that's likely sold break-even or at a loss?
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They thought of that many years ago, before adding lock support to Alexa. You can lock the door with a simple command, but unlocking or opening requires a pin code. Nobody can get into my house by shouting through the windows.
Can you say your PIN? And if so, can a recording of you or a simulation of you saying it be played?