We have at least 8 Echos around the house, with clear reasons for a couple more, but Amazon simply isn't interested in the actual problems that the product solves, or the use cases customers care about.
They're completely backwards, here. If that means the whole thing collapses and we have to find another solution, great. Products and companies who work this way need more failures.
What it could/should have been is the end cap for the Amazon brand in homes. A loss leader itself, but a constant reminder of the value of the company and the desire to keep spending money there due to the convenience it provides.
What the article makes it sound like they want is something more tangible. Something that quantitatively generates direct ROI. They'll never get that, or rather, that number will never add up to one that justifies Alexa's existence.
AWS and their massive logistics platform will support this terrible management for awhile but it will continue to destroy the brand.
Folks need to be discerning with tech purchases. If it isn't in a company's interest to make your experience better (and it is in the company's interest to make your experience worse, say, with ads) when push comes to shove they will prioritize profits over your customer experience. Instead of investing in rotten platforms like Alexa, I wish more people invested in open source and non-exploitative solutions where the incentives align to improve user experience, not destroy it.
Imagine a world where you could self-host or pay a small fee to cloud host your own smart assistant, tweaked to your preferences, not in any way linked into ad sales for Amazon or Google. That's where I'd like to see us go.