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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Is Amazon actively trying to kill of their Echo/Alexa business? Every story about Alexa for the past six months, maybe a little more, have been about Amazon taking steps to dismantling anything with in their business or product line up that could potentially be useful.

If they aren't making money, and don't believe that they ever will, then why not simply shutdown the whole thing? Is this some weird way of doing that, while not upsetting the stock market for the next quarter?

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Amazon thought people would say "Hey Alexa, buy more paper towels, a pack of soap, rent breaking bad season one, and tell me about the top rated blender in the store"

Instead people say "Hey Alexa, set a timer for 10:00"

The funny thing is, if it wasn't Amazon that Alexa was ordering stuff from, you could bet your ass people would have been using it like that.

But because Amazon sells used diapers, counterfeit items, can have gigantic price swings for some items, and has reviews that are gamed to the gills, no one would ever want to order from there blindly.

I don't think Amazon management is aware of how bad their site as gotten.

presumably because they have people shopping for them

Amazon management is very aware. They just do not care. Legal has even instructed teams in this regard. I hope FTC will drop the hammer on Amazon.

By a mile set timer is my most frequent Siri command.

It’s the only command that even has a chance of working consistently.

I absolutely hate how these products attempt to be good at everything, and therefore suck at anything.

But Alexa devices are so stupid they can't operate without the Internet. So if the Internet/Wifi goes out due to ISP issues or power loss, your devices can't set timers and any previously set alarms (i.e. wake up alarms) will fail to go off.

I need it to turn on/off lights, tell me time/weather, set timers and that's pretty much it. They can shut off everything else for all care. Maybe provide me with a GPT level conversational agent, hell, I take some Llama3.1 with function calling on Amazon Bedrock.

That loses them money and with no way to monetize- they have no incentive to keep it around

Other than the obvious privacy angle, is that why Apple want to do almost everything on device? No services to run, just let people pay the price of actually producing the device and the software and not worry about the running cost?

There never was a business here to begin with. Amazon wants to kill Alexa because they couldn't find a way to monetize it.

But then why not just shut the whole thing down? Tell customers that the services will be shutdown January 1st. 2026 and yank the remaining device from the store? That's where we're heading anyway.

If they do that I'll completely write Amazon off.

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