People were worried about freshness with produce delivery. Amazon tackled it head on by literally calling the service "Fresh". They're going to have to so something drastic here too.
Rather, I think Amazon realized they're a huge tech company that missed the lucrative phone game (despite trying with Amazon Fire). They realized they could be first to market with home automation, so they jumped on it. But they're still an online store, so they obviously had to include "buying stuff" as one of the main features.
Basically, my point is: I don't think their premise ever was "the best way to order stuff is via voice", but rather "we need to let people order stuff since we're Amazon, and we're doing the best we can with the medium".
No but the people that are working on Alexa (the engineers) are probably too wealthy to empathize as well, a poorly paid one is probably earning more than at least 80% of the population. They might have financial pressures of their own, but they're unlikely to care if the the oreos cost $2 or $3 today.
Software Developers, particularly in Silicon Valley are out of touch with most of the world.
Edit - Just to demonstrate, how much RAM would you say the average desktop has? If you said anything over 4GB you might be out of touch with most people even in a field you know: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/
I'm perplexed as to why your target is, specifically, engineers. Why not product managers? Designers? VPs? CEOs? They tend to be much closer to making actual decisions and, as well off as engineers are, CEOs are on a whole other level.
> too wealthy to empathize as well
This is not a thing. Wealth doesn't reduce someone's capacity for empathy. What wealth is likely to do is simply make the individual less acquainted with a certain range of situations, which is something a person can rectify if they wish. Many people don't, and are clueless, but that's another matter, and not limited to wealth.
I don't think it's fair to say that, say, a person who's pushing accessibility at a company is unable to empathize because they're too well off. You're basically blaming people for not having worse lives. How dare they have more GB than most people. This is just crabs in a bucket syndrome.
And Seattle is not in Silicon Valley.
So do I, but unless you're carrying around a spreadsheet with the historical prices of every item you will be over paying for some things. I'm much less sensitive to the daily fluctuations than many/most though because I don't have to watch where every cent is going.
> I'm perplexed as to why your target is, specifically, engineers
I'm not targeting anyone, just pointing out that the empathy line for Joe Average is much lower than the billionaire level.
> What wealth is likely to do is simply make the individual less acquainted with a certain range of situations, which is something a person can rectify if they wish.
Correct, any person can rectify it if they want to, but it would take a concerted effort and even then there are many things they would likely not understand correctly, like the physiological effects of poverty. "Not knowing what you don't know" is also something many from wealthy backgrounds would experience in this regard, making it harder for them to empathize. Perhaps "too wealthy to empathize naturally" would be a better way to say it but I wasn't expecting this level of pedantry.
> You're basically blaming people for not having worse lives. How dare they have more GB than most people.
I'm not blaming anyone for having more GB, I'm blaming them for not knowing what a typical amount is. As software developers would should have some idea what our hardware constraints are shouldn't we? Otherwise we end up with terrible glorified IRC clients using GB's of RAM that our users don't have.
Most engineers are not billionaires. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark.
It's really not beneficial to lump up these groups together like this.
> Perhaps "too wealthy to empathize naturally" would be a better way to say it but I wasn't expecting this level of pedantry.
"Too wealthy to empathize well" is a statement that deserves pedantry. It implies that wealth just makes people incapacitated, but the reality is much more complicated and distinguishing levels or sources of of wealth, something that you are not doing here by lumping engineers and billionaires in the same bucket, is very important here.
If "too wealthy to empathize well" was a realistic statement, the average poor person in the US would have very little empathy because they're technically more wealthy than the majority of the world population, but that is an utterly ridiculous statement to make.
> I'm not blaming anyone for having more GB, I'm blaming them for not knowing what a typical amount is. As software developers would should have some idea what our hardware constraints are shouldn't we? Otherwise we end up with terrible glorified IRC clients using GB's of RAM that our users don't have.
Slack seems to be more popular than the average IRC client, so I am not even sure if this statement makes sense. If anything, resource hogging seems to be mostly an engineering concern, while for the average person, it's much more important that the UX experience is good, which Slack offers and old IRC doesn't, so all these people who you say don't have enough RAM seem to go to Discord and Slack while IRC remains too difficult to use.
Which isn't to say that engineers shouldn't push for better resource utilization, it is after all kind of our job, but it's often an uphill battle against those very users with low RAM.
I am not saying that the group of people whom it influences more will not be more aware of things, I'm saying engineers are not really yet the group where ignoring prices to the point of letting a computer arbitrarily buy things makes sense, and I think the "this device is just out of touch because it got designed by rich engineers" holds little water. It seems, rich or poor, nobody really likes using the device that way, and I concur with some of the other posters that maybe this wasn't the ultimate purpose of the device.
There are actually a number of studies that indicate it might indeed be a thing.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
The fact that an online retailer actually has a physical device in the customers' home is actually a huge thing. Amazon takes away one competitive advantage from the offline retailers.
Just hypothesizing now, but having a device in the customers home could also proof to be invaluable to reduce re-delivery rates in the future.
Also, the browser is where people compare prices much more than in any other buying interface. Blame it on the very high "UI bandwidth" of browsers, which voice lacks. A tiny fraction of users switching to an interface that allows makes bargain hunting hard and thus allows higher margins can be extremely valuable to the vendor.
Ordering by telephone was completely normal 30 years ago; voice was definitely not an impediment when there was a human on the other end of a phone line able to understand and resolve ambiguity. The only problem with voice UIs is cost. When a machine can replace the human operator voice will work perfectly well.
> The TimTam Pulse Therapeutic Wearable System Wireless TENS Unit + Mobile App Muscle Stimulator for Chronic Athletic Pain Recovery costs $199. You asked me to confirm purchases if they cost more than $15. Are you sure you want to continue this order?
"The biscuits! You stupid computer, I want chocolate biscuits!"
They didn't just think of the idea one afternoon and run with it. Development took years. I'm sure they had plenty of meetings about this problem.
Some poorly thought out products that come into mind, Windows Vista, 8, IE, Android (earlier versions) - just to name a few.
I think the same might be the case with Alexa, it's just in its public testing phase.
A huge portion of the performance and instability issues were due to poor driver support. Vista was a major jump forward from XP, and in many cases the drivers needed to be significantly updated to handle this - and a huge amount of work that needed to happen to handle this, simply didn't occur. Microsoft aggressively pushed for drivers to be updated, and a lot of manufacturer's just didn't listen.
The other half of it was more than half a decade had occurred in between. Resource requirements went up for the OS - this isn't unexpected, and you can see the same between any 5 year jump in most every other OS. Trying to run Vista on a system specced for XP wasn't a great experience, especially when coupled with all of the driver issues.
By the time 7 had come out, Vista was more than fine. The drivers had been updated, people were using machines with more RAM and faster processors. If they had just skipped Vista and released 7, we would have seen the exact same issues - people would still be buying machines with XP specs in mind, hardware manufacturers would have had a shit story on drivers, and we would be talking about how 7 should have been called 8 beta.
I'm a *nix guy so I have plenty of personal bias against Microsoft for a wide variety of reasons and on a wide variety of subjects - but most of the hate for Vista never should have been directed at Microsoft. I've always had a Windows desktop for gaming, even though the vast majority of my time is spend using a Mac laptop or SSH'ed into Solaris or Linux servers, and I've run every version of Windows since 3.1 - Vista, itself, was fine. It was certainly no ME.
Driver-compatibility and resources usage should have been taken into account when released. Those two weren't the only major problem with the OS.
Should they never add new features that will utilize more cycles or more RAM?
I honestly have no idea what you think Microsoft should have done better here.