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Alexa had “no profit timeline,” cost Amazon $25 billion in 4 years
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Technology
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No company blows 25 billion on purpose without a reason
It's a good thing their reason is explained very clearly in the article linked in this post. They believed Alexa would have a high "downstream impact", i.e.generate sales or subscriptions elsewhere in the company. Which it has so far failed to do.
Amazon wants the loss to avoid paying taxes. They would never admit it is doing well collecting data.
Can you explain to me exactly how moving where profit is recorded from one division to another in the same organization reduces their tax burden? Because, excuse me, I know I only did a year or two of accounting courses before dropping the degree, but that's not how I understand taxes to work.
Also to be turning a profit by "doing well collecting data", the open market value of the data Alexa alone annually generates would need to be around 8% of the entire global data market. If you can justify how millions of instances of "Alexa set a timer for 10 minutes", "Alexa what is the weather", or "Alexa play despacito" generates that much value, maybe you have a point.
“Excuse me”
You seem pretty agitated, and I don’t want to engage with you if you’re going to be impolite.
Yeah well, apologies for being a little sassy, but I'm not exactly a big fan of your tone either.
Read it in a polite tone.
You used polite words, but you were condescending. I'm not interested in whether that was intentional or not, but that is the vibe you gave.
It’s the vibe you put on it. Not the intended vibe. Not everyone is trying to start shit.
As I said, I don't care if you "intended" to be condescending, I'm saying you were. Judging by your comment history you often are, so maybe get used to people responding with a bit of attitude.
Don’t judge a book by its comment history. You should block me, so we don’t have to interact again. I will do the same. I wish you well.