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Comment by rrggrr | Hacker News Reader

I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.

>I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.

$2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now.

In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening the $18 BILLION profit per QUARTER anytime soon.

If you're talking about "threats," I don't see what retained earnings have to do with anything. Amazon's revenue is roughly half of what Apple's is -- Amazon is significantly smaller, but it's in same ballpark as Apple, not orders of magnitude smaller.

Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.

>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.

I thought capitalism was a for-profit endeavour. Unless Amazon runs as a non-profit, it's just people investing in perpetuity based on pure belief/speculation of imagined future profit (and of course, on actual stock-based profits). Not that different from any pyramid scheme, which is why historically the stock market has periodical bubbles and crashes.

Those kind of rewards for the kind of actual prospects the company has are more or less a speculative bubble, with little basis on objective reality. $600 billion in "cash" on the other hand, that's something to keep you going and to talk about.

Apple could even get to be privately owned company with their buybacks -- Amazon wouldn't even stand a year as one at their churn rate.

>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces

Walmart does thin margins too -- but with huge revenues and profits compared to Amazon.

I'll agree that the sale of Echo caught both Apple and Google with their pants down, but I don't think it's going to last long. Apple could, quite easily, make a Siri standalone (and so could Google). Tying it to the phone was a great idea, but the implementations of both weren't the greatest. Plus, with Apple keeping Siri as a closed environment for so long probably hurt it as well.

But all that said, Echo is a neat device but not unique. It can be easily outpaced by either company if they choose. Amazon's "Skill Store" for Alexa is piss-poor and the ability to add skills is horrendous. Getting a skill approved is a nightmare, and they basically have to be "free" skills to have any potential.

If Amazon can figure out how to monetize skills, they may be able to pull ahead. But as it stands, right now, Echo is a novelty device that appeals (mostly) to kids.

Apple has no one to blame but themselves (history may be rhyming here) if they lose that market. Apple had many, many quarters where they sat on Siri and did not open it up to developers via an API, and could have killed Echo in the cradle.

They still can, and that's the truth - Echo may have momentum but Apple has a 1 billion device installed base. Any opening up of Siri via API would suck the air out of the market.

Yep and as I read in another thread here, Echo is US only basically because it's localization features are based on a US zipcode. The US only market is not very big while the richer part of China in cities like Suzhou, Hangzhou and ofcourse Shanghai and Hongkong have sold a lot of iPhones which you can see on the streets. The subsidy plan is still in place there. In the EU people with money got iPhones as well : in my friend group I am the only one with an Android phone (p8 max because of the battery life and my huge dutch hands can type with one hand on it) and everyone is waiting for the 7. I think Echo is an easy kill for Apple if done right and timely aka now.

Offtopicish: I think the first to offer the battery life my phone has in an iPhone like package will sell a lot: even my mother got an iPhone because the battery life on her Samsung was too miserable and in her head this equals 'Android' so no more Android... work to do this reunion'

I wouldn't write them off yet. Apple has been late to several markets (e.g., iPod and iPhone) and yet ended up doing quite well in them.

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