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Originally Posted by soondai
baffling. First step toward some bigger plan or self-contained boondoggle? Or am I just completely out of step and this thing could conceivably sell?
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Indications are it will sell.
Not in take-over-the-world numbers but in make-some-decent-coin numbers.
First of all, if you strip away the speech recognition hype, you're looking at a good quality Bluetooth wireless speaker for $99. There's a market for that.
Second, it's an internet audio streamer. There's a market for that.
Third, there's the cool gadget holiday gift aspect. There's a market for that.
There's something like 50M Prime subscribers out there by now so if Amazon gets even 1% to buy Echo, that's $50M in sales. A toy like this, coming for the holidays, can easily do three-four times that. How many Silivalley startups would be thrilled with $50M in sales out of the gate for their new device? Hint: a lot.
Odds are the thing is running FireOS and if it sells enough it will probably get an SDK for android developers to adapt apps for it. Or cook up entirely new ones. Since it has both speakers and microphones it could host internet telephony apps, home security apps, and entirely new classes of apps.
It's a (mostly) new category of device so it can just as easily thud once the new toy shine wears off or it could evolve into a billion dollar business or something in between. Nobody really knows for sure.
But it will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Other companies just sit on their cash piles collecting interest and little else: Amazon puts everything to work, looking for new ways to make money. If nothing else, they're entertaining.