Amazon Alexa / Echo — the strategy behind it | Stratrix

Company profile

Industry: Consumer electronics
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Seattle, United States
Ownership: Part of Amazon.com, Inc.

Profiles are auto-generated and infrequently updated.

The analyses

The Money Machine · Business Model

Alexa Was a Razor Built to Sell Blades. Nobody Ever Bought the Blades.

Amazon sold the Echo cheap, betting voice shopping would pay it back. People used it to set alarms instead. The deeper problem: an internal metric called 'downstream impact' kept scoring a money-loser as a winner, and the devices business it sat inside bled more than $25 billion.