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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

#361

Post by thehappypm »

genewitch wrote: post #327
thehappypm wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone have an obsession with “cheap money”? You still need to pay a loan back, can reduced interest on a loan really prop up a company up? I feel like that vastly overstates the impact of interest costs on business’s bottom lines

"cheap money" lets you buy users. Netflix "allowed" people not paying the bill to use netflix accounts of those who did, Amazon sold devices at cost to get market share, uber et al hemorrhaged money to become ubiquitous as "taxi", and so on. When money isn't cheap anymore, and you have to start showing a profit to get more money , the screws turn and users get squeezed. Merely showing a profit doesn't mean anything i…

This doesn’t really answer the question though.

Netflix for example has a lot of costs — servers, payroll, content creation, licensing, etc.

Interest is one cost, but hardly the whole picture of them. How exactly does Netflix’s interest costs going up mean their business model fails? Does it mean they must charge $10.50 instead of $10 per user?

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

#362

Post by hakfoo »

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…

The problem is compounded by their seeming desire to always claim they have something

I did a search recently for a specific part. "39SF010". (a ~USD1.50-3 flash-ROM chip that is backordered til next year from "legitimate" vendors and from the manufacturer themselves). This is one keyword, and a pretty damn distinctive one. There's little room for there to be a "helpful" algorithm to fix my typing into something better.

With the default results, the first page contained 48 items. Exactly ONE was a relevant product. As a customer, I'd have been perfectly happy to see "results 1-1 of 1" and called it a day. But Amazon clearly didn't want to admit their warehouses are not infinite. There would be some potentially competent fuzzy match options there, but they whiffed it hilariously. Show me some other flash-ROMs, or at least other ICs, programmers, or breadboards, or those starter-kit boxes of no-brand resistors and capacitors... but they instead listed a bunch of toothbrush heads, a box of cookies, three random power bricks, a barbecue grille, flourescent bulbs, and a set of power tools running north of $1500.

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

#363

Post by hakfoo »

fbdab103 wrote: post #165
MichaelCollins wrote: post #59

I think in the future, products like Alexa will be simple products purchased once for a profit (not loss leaders) that do all the processing locally, not service subscriptions. I mean, do you really need an internet connection and "cloud" services to implement an egg timer you can talk to? Maybe they'll have an internet connection to check weather.gov, but that's about all that's really needed.

I want to subscribe to your future. Everyday I see more and more devices insist they require the Internet. Washing machines, TVs, thermostats. Seemingly the market for offline devices is limited. MBAs need that recurring revenue.

We can hope for a future where the "recurring revenue" model melts down.

There's two sorts of it, as I see it, and both of them do have weak spots:

* Turning everything into a data vaccuum to sell to marketers. Something like the GDPR but angrier could pop that balloon pretty decisively, as could shifts in marketing trends if advertisers start considering tracking critically as a cost centre, rather than the current FOMO snowball.

* Unbundle bits and pieces of the experience to sell back to you on a subscription. This still feels like the data's not in yet for a lot of products.

I suspect we see it being trialed a lot with cars because so many of them are leased and therefore have a predictable trade-in life. As long as the annoying $10-per-month service comes with a three-year trial, the original lessee never needs to think about the subscription model, it more becomes an albatross to make the used car look less appealing by comparison. It's harder to pull that particular trick for other products, as their service lives vary widely. I suspect that, for example, many home appliances with a subscription would end up with a lot of angry and confused calls to support when the machine "stops working" at the end of a trial/missed payment/etc. Having to pay for that support burden and associated brand damage may unwind most of the profit the subscription yielded.

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

#364

Post by system2 »

quesera wrote: post #358
system2 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have enough aluminum wrap at home to enforce my hat. If you read it carefully once again, you will see that they are RECORDING YOU AT ALL TIMES and there only a piece of paper from the government is stopping then from sharing it with others.

> If you read it carefully once again Frankly I'm baffled at how you could be as confused as you claim to be.

I didn't have a chance to meet wise gurus like the ones on HN.

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

#365

Post by thorncorona »

musingsole wrote: post #288
thorncorona wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanlon's Razor -- maybe Alexa matches to the most probable match and not many people are expecting what OP expects Alexa to play?

Which is the core problem with Alexa: why is a personal assistant getting worse at helping me specifically (even if it's better for the majority of users)? Alexa arriving with a default profile for generic recognition makes sense -- but after that, it should have learned me, my voice, my commands. Instead, it was one more not so subtle demand from Silicon Valley to become synonymous with their Product Persona -- or b…

That, while possibly true, is a different problem than "This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears."

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

#366

Post by projektfu »

saghm wrote: post #346
projektfu wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alexa, what's the wind like today? Worked for me

Totally possible that I just phrased the query in a way it didn't understand, and totally possible that a Google Home just can't do this (or couldn't at the time). If anything, I think that kind of illustrates another important point; not only is it hard to figure out what exactly a given voice assistant is capable of doing, it's also pretty hard to tell the difference between "I need to phrase this differently" and…

Agree 100%. I realize my comment sounded like a flippant dismissal because, well, that's what the internet does, but I meant that this phrasing works on Alexa and maybe also on Google. Siri answers by telling me it's clear and 36 degrees, FWIW. What's the wind speed today? worked for Siri, but its voice response isn't the wind speed but "it looks completely calm right now". Did I ask for your opinion, Siri?

A lot of apps have tie-ins to Siri but it's very hard to discover them and understand how to use them. I think the negotiation of the shared language between us and our robot servants/friends/overlords is going to be difficult until we can answer that question.

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

#367

Post by andrepd »

tiahura wrote: post #316
andrepd wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum. If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.

Isn't this the most trivial and minor of conveniences? Wouldn't it take roughly the same amount of time to pick up your phone and type that? Don't you feel the least bit uncomfortable that the trade-off for that is that a tech giant gets a 24/7 audio feed into your and your family's home?

Boggles the mind.

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

#368

Post by stemlord »

dylan604 wrote: post #321
subpixel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Alexa is a trust-interface. Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, so they sure as hell won’t trust some bot to spend their money for them there. I just decided not to buy an item from Amazon despite it being cheaper, because I need it and I don’t have time to deal with it being a model from a previous year or whatever the catch may be.

>Many consumers don’t trust Amazon anymore, on HN. I know many many many people that don't give one iota about the things you and I might care about regarding Amazon's "quality". All they care about is that they thing they want is available, fast/free shipping, and at a price they are okay with paying. They don't know one thing about comingling inventory, they don't care about fake reviews, or any of the other things…

> on HN.

Really? Because Amazon is on pace to lose $10B this year

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

#369

Post by bigtunacan »

bobsmooth wrote: post #237
bigtunacan wrote: post #22

From the article, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather. Those questions aren't monetizable." This is mostly how I use Alexa, but those requests to play music are backed by an annual Amazon Music Unlimited subscription that I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have Alexas throughout the house.

Can Alexa play music without a subscription? My Home Mini will play a radio station if I ask it for a specific band or genre without a sub to YouTube Music.

Yes, the unlimited subscription gives you access to a much larger selection of music.

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

#370

Post by tiahura »

andrepd wrote: post #367
tiahura wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum. If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.

Isn't this the most trivial and minor of conveniences? Wouldn't it take roughly the same amount of time to pick up your phone and type that? Don't you feel the least bit uncomfortable that the trade-off for that is that a tech giant gets a 24/7 audio feed into your and your family's home? Boggles the mind.

The expected value of harm caused by tech giant listening to my house = 0. Trivial and minor > 0.
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