Internet connected listening devices in your home fail to make money

[Hotwired]

It's fun to mock Elon desperately trying to make money out of people wanting to post mostly junk, sycophancy and abuse on a message site he overpaid for but lets make time for others looking to make money by sheer brute force of already having unimaginable money and failing.

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

Layoffs reportedly hit the Alexa team hard as the company’s biggest money loser.

arstechnica.com

The business model seems insane. Sell cheap and then... somehow make money without making it so obnoxious that the speaker is launched out of a window?

 

[Hotwired]

Its not a colossal failure, the goal of amazon is to increase its free cash flow in the future.

To do so you need people using their services, and so, you have online shopping, video, music, books, smart devices, now you have robot vacuums, and who knows what else.

Saying you're doing it for cash flow would be online delivery from supermarkets. I have large doubts doing that is profitable but it could be accepted as keeping market share by making sure you're as accessible as the competition and by being a loss leader since the only way you get to use it is by ordering a bunch of actually profitable product.

But smart speakers are not hard wired to make money for Amazon. It doesn't invade your privacy with radio style adverts or data harvesting due to the law so it's a cheap "smart" tool to the public and a bottomless pit to Amazon.

There's no pressure to use any services that Amazon could skim a fee from.