(2022-11-22) Amazon Alexa Is A Colossal Failure On Pace To Lose $10 Billion This Year

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year. The hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity."

By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa.

We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices." That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice.

Business Insider's tracking now puts Alexa at third place in the US voice-assistant wars, with the Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple's Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month.

Apple's smart speaker plans focused more on the bottom line. The original HomePod's $350 price was a lot more expensive than the competition, but that was probably a more sustainable business model. Apple's model didn't land with consumers, though