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There has been a lot of talk about a correction coming and a bubble bursting specifically in tech for years now. Is this it?
The current round of job cuts and stock drops puts the industry back to ~mid 2020 levels.
So it is definitely a correction, but hardly world ending.
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Having a microphone/speaker in people's houses seems like a great way to collect a ton of data & guide their behavior.
No security researcher has ever found proof that they are "always on" and recording everything people say. If they were, it would be front-page news and Amazon would have government investigations. The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).
While absence is hard to prove, an intentional or unintentional data collection beyond what is stated in their policies is highly unlikely.
> 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?
Eventually people will say "Alexa buy my groceries"
Alexa will buy from the highest bidder
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If so it’s very mild so far
Agreed, these recent moves are not a great sign, but the dot com crash was so much worse from a people and company perspective. The moment that sticks with me is (former) employees wheeling all the Herman Miller chairs through the parking lot with the facilities guy holding the door open saying "Take it. Take it all..."
> 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?
"Alexa, put that on my shopping list" directs spending to Amazon in lieu of whatever the local alternative would have been.
10 000 out of 1 500 000
1,500,000 includes all the hourly workers but my understanding is that the 10,000 is corporate. Still only 3% of corporate workers which is less than they pip every year
> 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.
How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs. Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?
Long-term, the hope is probably that the halo effect - "oh, I have Alexa, so I'll buy a Ring security system" and "Alexa, buy cat litter" sort of stuff - balances it out nicely.
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How is that much loss possible? Not a hardware engineer, but from the exterior it feels like there is nothing exotic about the design which would warrant extravagant development costs. Have they been funneling billions of RD into the software side, or are the units comically underpriced and have a BoM in the hundreds?
My wager is that the devices are sold as a loss leader. Then on top the software development is fairly novel - so they're probably spending quite a bit on development efforts related to the devices. They're eating the costs for running the backend processing for all of these devices (they're sold as a one time fee, despite requiring services provided by Amazon servers). Finally - they were promoting the ever loving s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No security researcher has ever found proof that they are "always on" and recording everything people say. If they were, it would be front-page news and Amazon would have government investigations. The devices listen for their wake word before ever transmitting data to the cloud. (This is also because the sheer amount of bandwidth needed for always-on would be un-economical even for Amazon).
This is not strictly true. I examined a master's degree thesis last semester where the student proved conclusively that Alexa devices are periodically spamming bursts of data back to Amazon HQ even when not woken. Beyond a heartbeat, too - MBs of data, not KBs. No clear idea what that data is, though. There's at least a small chance it isn't benign.
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the correction is happening now. the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor. The economy has since rebounded and companies are returning to previous levels. The war isn't helping however
>"the pandemic pushed all these tech companies up artificially. they hired in record numbers to meet demand and thought it would be permanent/the new floor." This is the really surprising thing to me - many(most?) of these companies are data driven companies. Companies with teams of analytics folks, data scientists, modeling-experts and teams of engineers working on tools to do ML and large scale data analytics. Do n…