I would not be surprised if it turns out that Alexa is the biggest thing they've ever done, including AWS.
AWS will likely be a $100-$150 billion market value business in five years, with $6-$8 billion in operating income. They're tracking to $3.x billion in operating income in the next four quarters. It'll be valued as highly as Intel and Oracle.
A device that tells you the weather, orders an Uber, or orders more low margin merchandise off of Amazon, is not going to generate that kind of massive financial return. You can look at every lucrative business Echo could touch, and there's no scenario under which it could extract a large amount of monetary value. Ads? Not a chance. Sales referrals? No, the high margin stuff people want to visually browse for. Services? It could be 50 times larger than Angie's List and still not match AWS. Ordering Ubers? Ordering food? Ordering movie tickets? Relatively small sales, small percentage cut businesses.
For instance, in the UK, Amazon has very recently partnered with an actual supermarket to sell some groceries[1]. If agents really catch on, what would a business pay to be the default milk provider when someone or their fridge says "I need more milk"?
It's hard to do worse than a platform that simply does not let third-parties in (Siri). I honestly don't understand why Apple is so opposed to the concept.
really?
Given what's going on with the FBI, I'm starting to see the absurd security of the platform as more a positive than a negative.
[1]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2933052/apple-frees-casual-io...
That doesn't allow publishing anywhere, which is still behind a paywall and still tightly controlled. It also still requires you to use a Mac, from what I can tell.
> Given what's going on with the FBI, I'm starting to see the absurd security of the platform as more a positive than a negative.
Oh yes, the wonderful mixup between "security" and security. "Security" is just DRM and Tivoization by another name. Actual security would mean a device that doesn't come with horrible RCE vulnerabilities out of the box, which Apple doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation for, as well as allowing the user to choose things like what data applications have access to. The two have absolutely nothing in common.
Which isn't the point the point is you can run what you want on your own device now regardless of whether Apple likes it or not.
The tight control is a feature, not a bug. I'd rather put up with this slight nuisance than have the adware, malware infested dump that is the Play Store. Random hackers and advertisers are a much more clear and present threat than anything Apple can do to me.
I've had less and less reasons to jailbreak over the past few releases, and with good reason, a jailbreak both lessens your security and functions as an exploit all on its own.
> Which isn't the point the point is you can run what you want on your own device now regardless of whether Apple likes it or not.
So they've lightened a tiny bit for PR purposes, while still not giving the average user any practical freedom.
> The tight control is a feature, not a bug. I'd rather put up with this slight nuisance than have the adware, malware infested dump that is the Play Store. Random hackers and advertisers are a much more clear and present threat than anything Apple can do to me.
The Play Store is by no means perfect, but it's never been that awful. And besides, I'm fine with Apple exercising reasonable control over their own App Store, as long as sideloading is reasonably simple.
> I've had less and less reasons to jailbreak over the past few releases, and with good reason, a jailbreak both lessens your security and functions as an exploit all on its own.
The exploit is there whether you use it or not, the only difference is whether it's you or malware authors who gain anything from it.