Amazon executives have tried to justify to their bosses the popular but money-losing home devices with Alexa and will soon offer a paid artificial intelligence version of the voice assistant to try to generate more cash, according to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporting.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
It’s comforting, in a way, that America’s powerful Big Tech companies can flail around for years with products that are unpopular or unprofitable — and sometimes both.
The companies have other wildly successful products, so a few stinkers won’t hurt them. But the struggles of a few high-profile products are emblematic of how these companies don’t always heed what you want.
One explanation is tech geniuses aren’t always as genius as we (or they) might believe. That context may help explain why Big Tech products can sometimes feel frustrating, such as unhelpful Google search results or scuzzy Instagram accounts.
Should these products exist?
If you had a lemonade stand with puny sales, you probably wouldn’t keep it going for eight years.
Only 5.5 million of its Pixel smartphones were sold last year in the United States. That was about 4 percent of total smartphone sales in the country, research firm IDC estimates. Apple sold 12 times that number of iPhones.
On the bright side, IDC senior research director Nabila Popal said, Pixel sales are better if you look only at the category of higher-priced phones. Pixel is popular in Japan. And Pixel gives Google a canvas to show its newest features, like AI-powered photo editing, that may spread later to other kinds of phones.
It’s also healthy if America’s dominant smartphone sellers, Apple and Samsung, had more competition for your business. I own a Pixel phone and like it.
But it seems people are sending a strong message that they don’t want the Pixel by not buying it, and Google isn’t listening.
Google declined to comment.
You might say the same about Apple TV streaming devices and Apple TV Plus.
Viewership is so low for the five-year-old video service that it doesn’t register in Nielsen’s rankings of Americans’ TV streaming habits. Among the ways that Americans connect to streaming services on TV sets, the Apple TV devices are quite far down the rankings with Google’s Chromecast devices, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer.
Apple didn’t reply to a request for comment.
There’s not much direct harm to you if relatively few people use Apple’s entertainment products or buy a Pixel phone.
One question, though, is what you might be missing when companies’ cash and attention is stolen by their little-used products. (A possibly terrible idea: What if instead of Apple TV, the company made a printer that people didn’t hate?)
Persistence is a virtue, except when it isn’t
Technology executives are eager to point out examples of their products and ideas that flopped for years, until they became spectacular winners.
There were predictions decades ago that Amazon would die because it was such a bad business. Meta’s history is littered with features, including Stories for Instagram and Facebook, that people mocked until they caught fire.
Big Tech companies’ patience to keep trying until you both love a product and it’s financially sustainable can be useful for you.
Amazon has poured money for a decade into Alexa and the company’s line of voice-activated home devices like Echo speakers. Many people love those products, using them to play music, set timers, check the weather or amuse their children.
Little of that enthusiasm, though, has translated into shopping on Amazon or other profitable activities for the company. Amazon’s gadgets division has lost lots of money, the Journal reported.
That’s one reason Amazon plans to start selling a remodeled version of Alexa based on a new form of AI. Some Amazon employees who worked on the project worry that few people will pay, Reuters, the Journal and Business Insider have said.
In a statement, Amazon said it believes the remodeled Alexa is an opportunity to “provide even more proactive, personal, and trusted assistance in the over half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world.”
The struggles of Apple in entertainment, Google in smartphones and Amazon’s Alexa show why some products from Big Tech companies can limp along for years.
Many successful companies and people are confident that popularity and profits will eventually come for their currently unloved products. Maybe they’re right — or maybe it’s a failure to listen to what their customers are telling them.