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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff.

Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead.

I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulfillment who left to go work for Alexa. They'd tell me what their team/group/org did and I'd ask "but how does that make money?" and they'd laugh. "Yeah, last year I heard we had less than a million in revenue, but hey, they're certain it'll become big somehow".

What a waste of talent.

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Amazon is known for spending a lot of money on ideas that may or may not pan out. At least under Bezos, that was a very critical factor to the overall success. [1]

> “As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2018-letter-to...

> All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead.

This is how you kill a tech company: stop innovating and fall back to simple “maximize revenue, cut expenses” MBA theory

Fine, forget putting those people to work on things that make money- have them innovate on 100 other projects instead of just this one that doesn't make money.

Amazon's innovation age is dead, imho. They are the Day 2 company that Jeff Bezos always warned about.

Yeah, I think I agree with that.

The other challenge though is doing 100 other things half-hearted. Perhaps they should be MVPing smaller ideas to see if they take flight, but ambitious projects always require substantial resources.

The complaint “this could have been amazing but leadership simply didn’t fund it enough” is another common gripe.

There’s definitely some craziness in the idea that everyone will order toothpaste with their voice and it will work well and replace an application to the point it will be profitable.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The early Fire Phone team was also the early Echo team and the Echo is several orders of magnitude more successful.

Lots of services built for Alexa have been spun out into AWS as well.

Well, we live in a free society. If someone wants a talented person to work on project X and they think that the project sucks, they can try to change teams, or resign to something that looks more interesting.

Amazon seems to be lacking in direction much more than talent anyway. There's still no way to limit the search to products that are both in stock and ship to the country I told Amazon to use for calculating shipping rates; while the flood of Chinese scammers would be a difficult problem to solve, increasingly I can't even get scammed because I can't find anything that pretends to ship to my address.

It's really baffling how Amazon is actively getting worse to buy from, and sees no problem with it.

It’s not baffling, it’s what happens as you approach monopoly status. They’ve got enough of online sales today that they have lost the drive to get better, unless better is more money.

Sounds like Google too.

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