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Alexa devices are a tiny portion of the Amazon business, as far as actual hardware sales. They are barely a blip on their radar. If Amazon approaches Apple in market value it will be because of their Amazon Store retail sales, mostly from third parties. That is and always has been Amazon's major source of income. Their devices are merely a means to generate more sales of services, not of actual hardware devices. If you pull out just the Amazon devices like the Alexa ones, the Kindles, the Fires, FireTVs, and whatever else they have, all those combined wouldn't put a dent in the competition like Apple, Google, and Samsung. Amazon has a really long history of having lackluster features for their devices, going back about a decade to the Kindles. You still don't have the simplest controls on book formatting on Kindles that should have been there a decade ago. IMO, Amazon excels in the retail store market, but they really don't have much in the electronic device market. I think the Kindle out lasted the eBook reader competition because Amazon knew how to create a good eBook store whereas Sony had better readers, as did other companies, but none of those now defunct business lines ever figured out the book store end of it. Alexa devices were not designed for use to ask them to do stuff for us any more than the Kindles were designed to allow us to read books we already owned. Amazon devices have a primary design purpose of fueling mega sales within the Amazon Store. New features tend to offer more ways to buy stuff rather than more features we would find useful for reading on or talking to a device. Amazon updates to their devices are more for boosting sales rather than actually improving the usability of said hardware. That's a good business plan, but really bad from our perspective as we prefer usable features and not retail generating ones.
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