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Millions of people use it despite it being “broken”. They just don’t know a good place to charge for the ongoing server costs. Hacker news keeps repeating that
by vineyardmike 3y ago
Millions of people use it despite it being “broken”. They just don’t know a good place to charge for the ongoing server costs.
Hacker news keeps repeating that the product doesn’t work or is broken or whatever, but it’s a hit. Millions of people use it daily.
- meiraleal 3y agoIf it was a hit, a monthly subscription would solve the issue.
- vineyardmike 3y agoConsidering they’ve slowly started moving features behind a subscription already, keep watching because I’ll bet Alexa becomes a subscription for most features beyond timers and weather and controlling your first 10 smarthome devices. It’s just hard to charge for something that used to be free.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoMillions of people actually use it? Or keep it as a paperweight who's sole job is to "Alexa turn off the lights" once a week? If it's the latter then you probably don't need to keep thousands of highly paid engineers since that's what Alexa could also do 10 years ago and what vehicle voice commands could do 15 years ago without internet connection and expensive data centers. Drops mic
- vineyardmike 3y agoWell how do you define “uses it” because your paperweight story sure sounds like use to me. They probably don’t need all those engineers, but there’s a long-tail of features people use beyond weekly lights. Also, Alexa works better than any car control ever has, and at a fraction of the price. You obviously need internet connectivity for the majority of features people care about. Like controlling devices over the network, getting weather, streaming music, etc