Absolutely! I’ve commented about it a few times on HN[1] as I was at Amazon at the beginning of Alexa of investment.
As with other projects Amazon’s plan seems to have been get big fast and figure out monetizing later. I’m sure ZIRP played some role in it and if not for rate hikes they might have kept it going for few more years.
But their aim from day 1 was to get millions of devices into customers home and then use that to boost e-commerce sales. When the second part didn’t materialize the initiative suddenly became a white elephant as it costs non trivial server capacity to keep the backend infrastructure running.
As with other projects Amazon’s plan seems to have been get big fast and figure out monetizing later. I’m sure ZIRP played some role in it and if not for rate hikes they might have kept it going for few more years.
But their aim from day 1 was to get millions of devices into customers home and then use that to boost e-commerce sales. When the second part didn’t materialize the initiative suddenly became a white elephant as it costs non trivial server capacity to keep the backend infrastructure running.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40009295