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Alexa had “no profit timeline,” cost Amazon $25 billion in 4 years
(arstechnica.com)
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I agree. Plus, right now Alexa is somewhat integrated with my life. I'm constantly interacting with Amazon's ecosystem. Take that away, and it becomes another online retailer (a hugely important one, but nonetheless...) and movie rental service. I could easily step away from Amazon in a way that is more difficult today.
Multiply that across their customers and is the value 6 billion per year? I don't know, that's a lot of money, but it's not a simple cost analysis.
Amazon claims to have Alexa on 100 million devices, so $6 billion/year would be $60/user/year.
It's not peanuts, but... Amazon Prime has 230 million subscribers worldwide, that is $140/user/year.
Sounds like one could be financing the other.