7 ms·

Is echo a profitable business unit for Amazon? I don't know a single person in my extended network, ranging from elderly family members to colleagues and tech

• bigchewy 11y ago
  Given the overall sales numbers and your survey of 0 out of 75, I think your opinions may be shining through despite your efforts to contain them. My equally anecodatal evidence is the opposite - Probably a dozen of my friends have purchased Echos in the last couple of months and almost all rave about it
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    What are the sales numbers?
• eclipxe 11y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459726284&sr=8-1&keywords=echo%5C#customerReviews http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=... 35k people have reviewed it. 4.5 star average. 35k > 75
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    I don't find this convincing in the least. Just looking through many of the 5-star reviews, several of them come from people who actively contacted Amazon to request to purchase Alexa, which gives a clear bias in favor of a positive review (someone actively looking to like it, or an active reviewer of newer tech, not really representative of mainstream users). Many others come from the pool of "Top 50 Reviewer" or "Top 500 Reviewer" which again suffers the same problem. It's an Amazon product, so it's obviously not OK with Amazon to deride it, and top reviewers are unlikely to jeopardize their affiliation-with-Amazon status to give it a significantly negative review. The problem is I don't know the underlying population these reviews were drawn from, and at a cursory glance it looks highly different than the kind of population whose reviews I care about. However, I will say that one substantial sub-population within the reviews, the sub-population writing reviews related to the way Echo can be used by differently abled people, does seem to present some compelling information about that particular use case. Other than that, the reviews don't give me much of a reason to care (about the reviews themselves, not Echo), and this is not yet even taking into account what surely must be armies of sponsored reviews discreetly coming from Amazon itself.
    • eclipxe 11y ago
      Yeah man
  • andersen1488 11y ago
    Yes, everyone knows you should trust a site's own reviews for a product online.
    • lowtolerance 11y ago
      Just like everyone should trust that someone on the internet is sincere in their claim to have surveyed 75 people in his social network(which magically contains a random distribution of the population) about their opinions on the Amazon Echo, with unanimously negative results.
      • p4wnc6 11y ago
        I'm not asking anyone to trust my network survey. I am saying, "Hey, I surveyed my network and it really disagrees, to a frankly unbelievable degree, from what the popular presentation is -- can someone point me to some sales, etc., data to understand this disparity?" Linking to Amazon reviews does imply a certain belief that it's a credible source of information, but I have never found that to be true. Many products I've purchased with 4-5 star average reviews and many thousands of reviews overall have nonetheless been defective, broken easily after opening, or fallen short of the descriptions in other ways. Additionally, there's also the problem of sources of review bias, like people who frequently review new tech and thus overlook certain rough edges or pitfalls because, to them, those aren't a big deal with bleeding edge tech and can be forgiven (but to regular consumers, it's often not true), or like people who have devoted many hours to climbing high in the rankings of Amazon reviewers, and are implicitly affected by thinking of how their review might affect the way they are perceived in the Amazon reviewer rankings. Of course, my sample of 75 from my network could also be biased, but I'm not asking anyone else to believe the result of that sample, or even to believe that I actually conducted that sample. You could even treat my comment as though it started out with "Imagine if the following was true:" and go from there if you wanted, and just treat it as a thought experiment in terms of how to actually prove the hype over Echo derives from actual sales success and consumer traction. It's very telling to me that my comment is downvoted and attacked on weak grounds rather than addressed. If it's any comfort, I really, actually have asked around 75 of the people in my network, which includes extended family of a variety of age ranges and tech propensity across the midwestern US. But I have also asked friends across Europe and southeast Asia over gchat and Skype too, as well as former colleagues in most of the large urban areas along both coasts of the US, and one in Mexico City. It's actually really, really, really easy for a person to get a pretty diversified sample of people just asking questions to their social network. There surely are dimensions along which it is not well diversified, such as people living below international poverty standards -- because the very nature of considering purchasing an Echo or having an internet connection and Skype account to talk to me overseas is correlated with not being below some international poverty line. And it's perfectly fine for people to suggest this invalidates the usefulness of my ad hoc social connection survey. It's disappointing to me that people are focusing on criticizing some ad hoc survey with a small N. No one, certainly not me, is claiming that survey to be statistically rigorous. But, if you assume the survey I describe did actually occur with the results I explained, then it's at least an anomalous outcome that might prompt someone to say, "Hey, what are the numbers that make people think Echo is actually successful?" If you don't want to assume anything about the survey, because it's an internet comment and you don't care, then fine. Don't. But in what possible way could it be valuable to divert attention away from the question at hand ("Why is Echo hyped?") and waste time arguing about an experience I claim to have had (asking for and receiving opinions on Echo) that you cannot verify. Amazon doesn't release sales numbers, and all the growth stats for Echo that appear in puff pieces are just described as sales growth, but relative to some baseline that we don't know. An article that says "sales up 300%" is junk unless you can actually see the sales data to understand what that 300% means. And don't get me wrong. This is not Amazon hate. I'm not Amazon's biggest fan for reasons of how they treat workers, but I am still an Amazon customer and I even wrote a whole thing on another post the other day talking about the usefulness and value I get from Amazon Prime Music. It just seems kind of nuts that someone can't say, "Hey, my experience when I've gone out of my way to ask about Echo to lots of people is that literally no one is interested in it -- what data is there to help me understand why Echo is still so hyped?" without being downvoted out of some HN group-think / Amazon tribalism. It really, really was an earnest question. I'm just asking for what data sources there are to suggest Echo's hype is justified. Linking to Amazon's own reviews for it is clearly not a reasonable answer. So, what else?
• barney54 11y ago
  I was skeptical until we visited our friend who own one. Our friend is blind and that's why they bought it, but it was fun to use and actually useful.
• qq66 11y ago
  This isn't an unusual phenomenon at all. If a person asks their 75 closest friends whether they own a snowmobile, the answer is likely to be 0 or a lot. Nobody's friends constitute a random sample.
  • p4wnc6 11y ago
    Nobody's friends constitute a perfectly random sample, but extended social networks are really good approximations of a random sample for questions like this. Two interesting points: at least 3 people in the 75 had snowmobiles (the family of a college friend who lives in Alaska) -- but also, 0% ownership rate for snowmobiles is not a bad approximation of worldwide snowmobile ownership rate, depending on the application you're using the data for. There are a ton of applications of survey data where assuming a 0% worldwide ownership rate of snowmobiles would be a super useful and perfectly reasonable approximation. Then there are others, like say, running a snowmobile advertising campaign in Minnesota, where that 0% estimate would be terrible. In fact, I would go a little further and say that for reasonably diverse sets of social connections, it would not be feasible to observe the effect you are saying (either a lot of people satisfy property X or none at all do) unless the property in question is extremely rare in general. Even thinking about connection data sets that are nearly perfectly clustered, like telephone connections in Belgium (which reveal structure based on whether the person speaks primarily French or primarily Dutch), it would be very, very uncommon to have zero opposite-language speakers in a 75-member sample of your network. I definitely believe that a random batch of 75 connections on e.g. Facebook, for many people, would be perfectly adequate for getting a coarse, approximate sense of something like general interest in a mainstream tech product. Will it have pitfalls -- of course, but absolutely no one is claiming otherwise. In fact, I am not even claiming the result is accurate. I am asking what data supports the hype over Echo. It's very strange to me that people are more interested in criticizing some openly-acknowledged-to-be-highly-inaccurate-yet-still-suggestive-of-anomaly ad hoc survey simply mentioned in a comment, rather than to actually ask what kind of data might empirically refute the sentiment of that survey.
• thoughtpalette 11y ago
  I've one, it's been amazingly fun and perfect for music and checking the weather daily. All my friends that have visited have played with it with great delight. A couple have already preordered one. It's a great device, don't knock it till you try it. Also, building skills is a fun way to play around with the device, and Amazon is coming out with better guides every week.
• iOSGuy 11y ago
  My girlfriend worked on it in a way, and while I thought it was kind of a silly idea we got one for the house. I've grown to love it as the best jukebox I've ever owned. The speakers absolutely rock, and once you've enjoyed the sweet bliss of being able to tell your jukebox what to do, "Alexa, this song sucks, NEXT!", "Alex, stop!", "Alexa, play '<insert song, artist or album here>'", you'll never want another music player. <Sorry Jeff, but it really is the best feature by far, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.> I also use it as a cooking timer, and for news in the morning. I can get a good hour out of "Alexa, tell me the news.", from BBC, to NPR, to just the weather for the day. Oh, and "Alexa, Simon Says <insert random things here>", has entertained us quite a bit. The downsides, it's voice recognition still has trouble when multiple people are speaking, or it's already playing musc if it's really loud. (ie: outside listening to music on the Echo inside) Also, the apps for it just still aren't all that useful, the beat box was fun for about five minutes, and that's it. Possible I just haven't found the good ones yet. All in all, it's still mostly a toy for early adopters who like to play with gadgets, but I can definitely see how it will eventually be incredibly useful. We now live in a Duplex, and I want a second one for the second floor.