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People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The s

by JCM9 1y ago

People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come. Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat. Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.

rhetocj23 1y ago
Sounds like the vision for this stuff was playing into made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet.
- bigiain 1y ago
  Yeah, Amazon jumped too early. The real business model that's winning the "made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet" is LLMs marketed as "Just about to turn into Artificial General Intelligence and turn the world into a post scarcity utopia" with the widely known but unacknowledged understanding that what they really mean is post scarcity for people who are already billionaires, not for the people we intend to put out of work -and that they don't need to create AGI for that, just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.
  - themafia 1y ago
    > just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour. They're already there. Inflation nearly doubled prices for consumer goods while wages have remained static. People are clearly too paralyzed to effectively organize their labor pool against these monopolists. > Amazon jumped too early. I disagree. The platform is cheap to manufacture and efficient to operate. They kept the walls on the garden too high. There was never any push to bring third parties or developers onto the platform in a credible way and never on an even footing with Amazon's own offerings. They clutched it too tightly. It was never going to pan out in the long term. It was a dazzling loss leader right up until Amazon brass realized it was unsustainable. Then the usual conversion into selling your own users data and cramming every spare inch with visual ads came as predictably as it always does.
dpark 1y ago
I have an echo show I bought years ago and it sits in a drawer. The constant ads are just too obnoxious and it doesn’t do enough useful to justify putting up with it. I still have a bunch of standard echo devices and they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. They completely missed the AI boat despite being positioned to be the ones to bring it to everyone’s homes and even the basic stuff seems to be getting worse. The devices misunderstand and fail to hear queries entirely more than they used to. I’m honestly very tempted to switch to Google home at this point. I’d consider switching to Apple but I have one HomePod specifically for some home automation integration and it seems even worse whenever I try to use it.
dreamcompiler 1y ago
Somebody sent me an Echo as a gift. Don't even know who. I buried it in the back yard. Didn't even take it out of the box. Fifty years from now some kid of the family that buys my house will find it and ask his parents what it is. They won't know. They'll have to go on the Interslop to find a "technological anthropologist" to figure it out. Then they'll try to donate it to the Smithsonian Museum of Bad Ideas but they will refuse it because they already have 1000 of the things back in their Indy Jones warehouse.
- musicale 1y ago
  Nice short story and +1 for Interslop, which I had never heard before today. And now I want to study technoarchaeology.

by JCM9 1y ago

rhetocj23 1y ago

Sounds like the vision for this stuff was playing into made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet.

bigiain 1y ago
Yeah, Amazon jumped too early. The real business model that's winning the "made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet" is LLMs marketed as "Just about to turn into Artificial General Intelligence and turn the world into a post scarcity utopia" with the widely known but unacknowledged understanding that what they really mean is post scarcity for people who are already billionaires, not for the people we intend to put out of work -and that they don't need to create AGI for that, just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.
- themafia 1y ago
  > just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour. They're already there. Inflation nearly doubled prices for consumer goods while wages have remained static. People are clearly too paralyzed to effectively organize their labor pool against these monopolists. > Amazon jumped too early. I disagree. The platform is cheap to manufacture and efficient to operate. They kept the walls on the garden too high. There was never any push to bring third parties or developers onto the platform in a credible way and never on an even footing with Amazon's own offerings. They clutched it too tightly. It was never going to pan out in the long term. It was a dazzling loss leader right up until Amazon brass realized it was unsustainable. Then the usual conversion into selling your own users data and cramming every spare inch with visual ads came as predictably as it always does.

dpark 1y ago

I have an echo show I bought years ago and it sits in a drawer. The constant ads are just too obnoxious and it doesn’t do enough useful to justify putting up with it. I still have a bunch of standard echo devices and they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. They completely missed the AI boat despite being positioned to be the ones to bring it to everyone’s homes and even the basic stuff seems to be getting worse. The devices misunderstand and fail to hear queries entirely more than they used to. I’m honestly very tempted to switch to Google home at this point. I’d consider switching to Apple but I have one HomePod specifically for some home automation integration and it seems even worse whenever I try to use it.

dreamcompiler 1y ago

Somebody sent me an Echo as a gift. Don't even know who. I buried it in the back yard. Didn't even take it out of the box. Fifty years from now some kid of the family that buys my house will find it and ask his parents what it is. They won't know. They'll have to go on the Interslop to find a "technological anthropologist" to figure it out. Then they'll try to donate it to the Smithsonian Museum of Bad Ideas but they will refuse it because they already have 1000 of the things back in their Indy Jones warehouse.

musicale 1y ago
Nice short story and +1 for Interslop, which I had never heard before today. And now I want to study technoarchaeology.