Amazon pours resources into voice assistant Alexa – Financial Times (Jan 16, 2017)
There are some very interesting estimates in here from Evercore about the financials associated with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa effort. The firm estimates that Amazon lost around $330m on the project in 2016, and that it will lose $600m in 2017, due to a combination of selling hardware at a loss and giving away developer access for free, despite the high cost of developing the underlying service. This hasn’t been talked about nearly as much as the consumer sales angle, but it’s worth noting – Amazon is treating Echo and Alexa as a loss leader, not a moneymaking enterprise in its own right. This is therefore not about selling Echo devices per se, but about using Alexa and Echo as a means to another end (or several) – more retail sales, a powerful consumer platform that can be used for a variety of other things Amazon wants to push, and so on.
via Amazon pours resources into voice assistant Alexa – Financial Times
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