Amazon's Alexa series of devices has COST the company $25 BILLION in less than 5 years?!

[thewayne]

If they're losing money at that rate, it really tempts me to order one! Onto a fresh Amazon account that'll never be used, needless to say. Also needless to say that I'll never order one. But this puts as big a smile on my face as Kamala causing so many problems for the Republicans.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/alexa-had-no-profit-timeline-cost-amazon-25-billion-in-4-years/

Comments

[armiphlage]

Oh, do go ahead and get their nice tech! Their Kindle Fire is a powerful barely-modified Android tablet with an excellent display, amazing battery life, and decent storage, at what has to be a price lower than the cost of all the components. It only takes a few minutes to disable all the bloatware.

[halfshellvenus]

The in-home SpyBot? Yeah, I won't be ordering one of those either. Or its cousins.

Needless to say, most of the people at my (tech industry) office do not have them either. ;)

[thewayne]

One of my good friends, whom I've worked with twice, surprised me by having one.  And he has (or had, dunno currently) a security clearance!  One night his wife woke him and said she heard voices in the basement!  So Phil crept downstairs, he also heard a voice, and it was the damn whatever it was saying 'Cannot connect to internet' over and over.  There had been a power outage and it needed to be reset or reinitialized or something.  While I wouldn't mind an Apple HomePod speaker as Apple takes privacy pretty seriously, I'm in no hurry to buy one.

[disneydream06]

Awww..... "Poor" Amazon.

[silveradept]

I wonder how much of the revenue of the Devices department and Alexa is tied to the fact that they have a microphone always passively listening to someone and can send what they hear for marketing analysis and targeted advertising from all kinds of other places. It's probably the biggest thing they have. (And if they were Google, Amazon would admit that up front that this is what they really were after with Alexa.)

[thewayne]

Similar idea behind their desired acquisition of Roomba, or whichever robotic vacuum cleaner they wanted to buy.  Gather marketable intelligence about your customers, and in the case of the Roomba, actual partial floor mapping.  I really don't know how valuable passive listening is, though, but that's not my field.

[silveradept]

I don't know, either, but it's at least rumored that phones do the same thing to us, so presumably there's enough market in it for people to want to keep at it.