> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient

> The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. I disagree. The issue here is they had a really great use-case and utterly failed to deliver to the end user. No one is requesting their smart assistants to order anything because there is absolutely no support on the platforms + absolutely no user trust of how that is going to go. If all they ever did was niche their assistant down to being a smart shopping list, it would have been a great product, and likely would have driven sales. Instead they failed at even the thing they would have been had an advantage on (selling things to customers who are buying from them directly). Google and apple would have been operating through a black box of "privacy preserving apis" to do the same with their own integrations. Then they proceeded to suck at the stuff all the other assistants also suck at.