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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

#491

Post by tgma »

chowells wrote: post #421
WalterBright wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax exclusive prices lets you know how much the government is soaking you, rather than hiding it and blaming it on the business.

That's irrelevant. Give me the total price, so I know how much something will cost. I don't care what percentage of it goes where. I only care about easily evaluating whether something is worth the price. Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit…

> The amount of tax is equally useless to me.

Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.

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

#492

Post by Reason077 »

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…

> "This is also why Amazon's Dash buttons failed."

Dash buttons failed because they were superseded by Alexa. And because they were a bit silly to begin with.

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

#493

Post by dietsprite »

If Amazon wants to continue to recoup this investment from Alexa sales, Amazon needs totally different leadership on the Alexa team. Alexa's app and user experience are terrible. Adding a skill is a highly convoluted process.

Most notably and most recently, the decision to drop access from 3rd party apps to its lists is an incredibly short-sighted idea. No one wants to use Amazon's software. Make Alexa effortless to use with 3rd party software. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24168681/amazon-alexa-thi...

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

#494

Post by conductr »

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…

My take on it was that Alexa was developed at a time they were trying really hard to solidify their continued existence as a tech company; AWS and kindle came around then too. The stock market values tech companies much higher than retail companies. That’s what justified the headcount expense

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

#495

Post by alexa_throwaway »

wordpad25 wrote: post #450
alexa_throwaway wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Alexa hooked up to some gimmicky LLM. I don't want to give away too many details given that this is a throwaway account, but the way Alexa's ecosystem works is they have "skills" Alexa users can instantiate. Our API would have increased the utility (and therefore usage) of some of the top skills by quite a lot. I think of the Alexa team the same way I think of juiced up bodybuilders who think they can beat u…

>Anyway, the past is the past. It sounds like Jassy is focused on turning around this division, which is a good thing IMO. If you got 10x bigger aren't they your competitor now or are you still tiny relatively speaking?

We're still tiny compared to Alexa, but we have over a million MAUs so we're not tiny for a startup.

At present, Alexa itself is not a direct competitor, although a large and growing use-case for Alexa skills would benefit directly from our tech. This may change if Alexa gets its act together, but based on the past year I'm not holding my breath!

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

#496

Post by dietsprite »

theGnuMe wrote: post #55
skhunted wrote: post #12

Alexa can add things to your shopping list but not take them off. You have to manually delete items in your shopping cart. This exemplifies why Alexa was never going to be successful. It is a user hostile experience.

The app on ios is dreadful...

Yeah, how they don't just build a native app and hire any UX agency of any repute given their immense resources and investment is beyond me.

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

#498

Post by jhgvhi »

crazygringo wrote: post #210
swatcoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

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…

[dead]

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

#499

Post by edgefield »

dietsprite wrote: post #493

If Amazon wants to continue to recoup this investment from Alexa sales, Amazon needs totally different leadership on the Alexa team. Alexa's app and user experience are terrible. Adding a skill is a highly convoluted process. Most notably and most recently, the decision to drop access from 3rd party apps to its lists is an incredibly short-sighted idea. No one wants to use Amazon's software. Make Alexa effortless to…

The UI is hilariously bad. I’m playing a NY Times podcast and say “Alexa, pause.” Two minutes later, I say “Alexa, play” and it starts playing some random news clip from ABC News.

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

#500

Post by alexa_throwaway »

OrigamiPastrami wrote: post #396
alexa_throwaway wrote: post #348

Throwaway here. I'm the CEO of a fast-growing AI startup. Alex asked to meet with us about a year ago (when we were about 1/10th the size), and after asking us to prepare lots of materials, they indicated they wanted to buy us or invest in us. People warned us not to talk to them because they have a reputation for gathering technical detail, and then trying to copy it rather than striking a deal. Our software could h…

> Today we're valued at more than that number and Alexa's core experience hasn't changed in the past year. They haven't been able to copy us. The Alexa leadership team has some hubris IMO. I can't really evaluate you since you want to stay anonymous, but you're not really giving any credibility here. FAANG being arrogant isn't really any different than flavor-of-the-year tech startup being arrogant. There are numerou…

Thanks for writing that. It may be that Alexa made the right decision to pass (time will tell, you're right the valuation itself isn't the best barometer) but the point of my post was simply that the Alexa leadership team felt very arrogant and disrespectful regardless of whether they made the right decision. They acted like we needed them, whereas in my opinion time has shown it was more the opposite.

I can't speak for all startups, but at my company we treat even the tiniest startups with respect, and even if we can't work together we wouldn't approach that decision the way Alexa did.

Anyway, as I mentioned in another comment, the past is the past. The Alexa leadership team is being shaken up and I wish them the best going forward. Just sharing my experience here because it's relevant to the thread.

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