https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1590732963750330369 Is Alexa to Amazon what the multiverse is to Meta?
Alexa alone was burning 2B a year in 2019, I assume that has only grown. They need to cut Alexa down by 80%
Regardless of the loss, look at peoples opinion and memes of Siri vs Alexa. The people like how smart it is
A lot of folks in the devices group coasted for a long time with some even getting promoted because of the earlier growth at all costs philosophy. They acquired failing companies like Blink, Ring, Eero and most recently iRobot and threw money at them to bring them under the grow at all costs mantra. With the changed macroeconomic environment, this philosophy will no longer work. And there will be a steep price to pay for all these employees.
Alexa has solid customer base, but is struggling with monetization. Plus typical empire building on every level and every org. Devices are sold with huge discount, I'm not sure if Amazon makes any profit of selling echoes. I think, smart speakers in general were overhyped, though, they have their niche. We dreamt about Jarvis, but got constant "sorry, I don't know that" instead :(
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Tom Taylor (SVP, Alexa) already got pushed out. He was the biggest piece of dead weight there. When Jeff B put him in charge of Alexa, I knew things were screwed. Will be good to refocus that whole business unit on core product, real AI research, and select growth opportunities and jettison many of the other useless teams. Like 20+ engineers just to run the feedback skill. So wasteful. But beyond that, metaverse has no known product market fit. Alexa is useful for home smart speakers for music and smart home use cases, automotive voice, and has room to grow now that large language models and generative AI are opening new doors. They just tried to throw too many things at the wall, piled the tech debt high and deep, and partitioned ownership in ways that made it take 4x the number of engineers to get shit done due to all the away team work.
Thoughts on Alexa Web Info org? Seems to be one of the better run orgs and not much redundancy and bloat.
Daniel Marcu's org? So he seems decent enough from my interactions with him. His team is taking a reasonable approach to building some more scalable experiences vs the hack-it-together approach of domain teams and the idiocy of the Knowledge org. But talent bar seemed middling when I worked with them a few years back and they aren't great at playing nice with others. I haven't seen much science output. And not sure how much of what they were talking about two years ago has shipped. So, mixed review from my end. Since they neither have the core science chops (BTW, Daniel himself has real old school NLP chops) nor the high traffic experiences, I would worry that they are a target for trimming.