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Alexa has apparently torched 10 billion dollars (just in 2022!) with nothing to show for positive cash flow. It's a cool gadget but they bet the damn farm on i

Alexa has apparently torched 10 billion dollars (just in 2022!) with nothing to show for positive cash flow. It's a cool gadget but they bet the damn farm on it. Thousands of people working on it over the years, all to just lose billions of dollars.

throwaway5959 4y ago
I’d really like to understand what all those people are doing. Like I can understand hundreds, but thousands? Does this thing carry on normal conversations with this people at this point? Like does it do much more than act as an alarm clock or Amazon order taker? Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?
- JTBooth 4y ago
  Related experience: I spent two years on Google Assistant's media team. We were ~35 people. Projects included integration with YouTube (5 person team), the visual UI for touch screens in cars (8), performance improvements (3-4), making "play" and "pause" commands work through the lock screen (3 people), backend migration to a new struct for representing a user query built by the linguists (5 people)
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around.
    - mattlondon 4y ago
      If people shift around, you still need people to support the previous work too, so you don't really gain anything. You still need 5 people to support and iterate features that YouTube effort etc.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - jldugger 4y ago
      > Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around. You're thinking of Siri.
  - ethagknight 4y ago
    It sounds like that's the fat right there! I know it's an example, but 8 people for visual UI? That's an example of something that could be down by 1 person or 100 people, depending on your attitude of design by committee. Easy to imagine meetings about meetings studying 500 possible interaction schemes before honing in on a final 15 to run mock-ups to evaluate before deciding to etc etc. Rube Goldberg vs just empowering someone to design something and move on.
    - wildrhythms 4y ago
      So 1 person to design, prototype, and test the thing? The design has to go thru many iterations, feedback sessions, approvals by managers and their managers, approvals from the design system folks, approval from the engineers who have to implement the thing. Then the prototyping- should a designer also know Java and the Android SDK to build a prototype? And should they commit the code into production and set up an experiment for A/B testing? (Whole set of data collection and bias concerns and approvals needed here) Or if they build a prototype in, let's say, Figma, is that high fidelity enough? (More internal feedback and managers required) Then the testing: building a research plan that avoids bias, asks the right questions, defines how success is measured, yeah the feedback might be subjective but the process needs to be empirical. And then gathering all of this data and compiling a whole set of research findings and suggestions so the manager-of-manager whoever is in charge can feel comfortable with going ahead and actually building the thing. (I work in UX, and there is a lot of bullshit like this)
- 32gbsd 4y ago
  Just throwing stuff at fan hoping something sticks. Vr, AI, anything.

throwaway5959 4y ago

I’d really like to understand what all those people are doing. Like I can understand hundreds, but thousands? Does this thing carry on normal conversations with this people at this point? Like does it do much more than act as an alarm clock or Amazon order taker? Also $10 billion? Do they hemorrhage money on hardware?

JTBooth 4y ago
Related experience: I spent two years on Google Assistant's media team. We were ~35 people. Projects included integration with YouTube (5 person team), the visual UI for touch screens in cars (8), performance improvements (3-4), making "play" and "pause" commands work through the lock screen (3 people), backend migration to a new struct for representing a user query built by the linguists (5 people)
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around.
  - mattlondon 4y ago
    If people shift around, you still need people to support the previous work too, so you don't really gain anything. You still need 5 people to support and iterate features that YouTube effort etc.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - jldugger 4y ago
    > Ah I’m starting to see how that can grow rapidly then if people are assigned dedicated projects instead of shifting around. You're thinking of Siri.
- ethagknight 4y ago
  It sounds like that's the fat right there! I know it's an example, but 8 people for visual UI? That's an example of something that could be down by 1 person or 100 people, depending on your attitude of design by committee. Easy to imagine meetings about meetings studying 500 possible interaction schemes before honing in on a final 15 to run mock-ups to evaluate before deciding to etc etc. Rube Goldberg vs just empowering someone to design something and move on.
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    So 1 person to design, prototype, and test the thing? The design has to go thru many iterations, feedback sessions, approvals by managers and their managers, approvals from the design system folks, approval from the engineers who have to implement the thing. Then the prototyping- should a designer also know Java and the Android SDK to build a prototype? And should they commit the code into production and set up an experiment for A/B testing? (Whole set of data collection and bias concerns and approvals needed here) Or if they build a prototype in, let's say, Figma, is that high fidelity enough? (More internal feedback and managers required) Then the testing: building a research plan that avoids bias, asks the right questions, defines how success is measured, yeah the feedback might be subjective but the process needs to be empirical. And then gathering all of this data and compiling a whole set of research findings and suggestions so the manager-of-manager whoever is in charge can feel comfortable with going ahead and actually building the thing. (I work in UX, and there is a lot of bullshit like this)
32gbsd 4y ago
Just throwing stuff at fan hoping something sticks. Vr, AI, anything.