Why Amazon Alexa is a failed device and led to layoffs
Good product, terrible targeting.
Why did Alexa fail? You can ask it to play music, you can ask it to dim your lights, turn on/off your TV and the theoretical grocery lists that you can create with it. It seems a pretty cute little deal. But why did it fail so bad?
Now, take a deep breath. Let’s read.
It’s been all over the news, that Alexa devices are making Amazon incur huge losses. Most of the layoffs at Amazon are happening from the Devices and Service division. A recent Business Insider report laid bare many other facts as well. But, it did not include the ‘why’.
So, what happened?
The reason is positioning. Let me explain. By now, the general perception that you have about the Alexa product is it is a cute little product for your home, it lights up your home lights and can do other things for you. You know that it is capable of many more things, but you do not know what exactly. You are not aware of the things that you can do with it. (And here is another instance where Amazon truly failed to educate the masses what can they do with it. Or in other words, to help the customer discover its usage). What customers are using it for are mostly to listen to music, dim the bulbs, and one or two home device usage mostly.
But, if you strip down all the bells and whistles, and you look at the core device, what is it? It is a speech recognition device which you can tell stuff to do for you. You can ‘automate’ stuff. A quick google search will turn up tons of results of what you can automate, how to and all. And the truth is, there is a learning curve to all of this. In short, it is not intuitive. Even with speech and the modern leaps that have been made in the NLP domain. Not intuitive surely, but does not mean that it is impossible to do awesome things with it. There are people who would definitely want to tinker around such devices and perhaps discover many more usage than you or I could imagine. (This is the second part, where you want users to spend time with the device). You want a loyal set of customers who are the real targets of your product.
So to summarize, you have a device which can automate home devices compatible with Alexa (and there are several such actually useful devices) and also, automate certain daily tasks such as alarms. But
a) you want a set of users who would discover further uses of the device,
and
b) you want a set of users you would love to tinker around and spend time with the device.
And who best fits this persona description? It is the geeks of course. Or at least a person who loves gadgets and can play around with it. One who is so busy with getting things done, that he/she would love if there was an assistant who could help them remember certain tasks that they are likely to forget. An AI assistant that could perhaps cook up a playlist if you are working on your code, or if you are gaming let’s say. Or expose its API to geeks to get creative. Infact, there is a developer page which I did not dig much into, but its very basic, but you can make external API calls through Alexa.
Another small reason is the consumer behaviour in using voice commands to perform tasks itself. Why small reason? Because our world is changing rapidly, and we can never really be sure how we might change how we behave. Hence, we cannot really blame Amazon for taking this bet in behavioural change. But at the core of everything is, it must add value to our lives.
By releasing a device to the common mass, who do not need such a device, Amazon made it bloated with unnecessary features thereby increasing the cost. One reason is greed. Amazon was (is) trying to increase its e-commerce sales by collecting data through such devices. It is not unethical to do this, I mean I am okay with it if it tries to target me with a cool looking pair of sneakers which I had been looking for anyway. But to miss the whole point of why would a consumer buy your product is whole another story.
To summarize again, it is a device whose intended use misses the audience. It is meant to automate your tasks, and only geeks have been creative with such tasks. When you release such a powerful device to the common mass, who do not know how to use it, you will obviously have unintended consequences.
References:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-alexa-job-layoffs-rise-and-fall-2022-11?IR=T
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST8uOLbqQUo
- https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/smapi/skill-operations.html
