crucifiction

AltriaBook

The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.

The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.

What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.

It is an ROI decision. Almost everyone on the planet now carries around an echo-equivalent in their pocket all day, that also happens to have video, GPS, text and call data, and as such is a far more significant personal privacy concern than a smart speaker in a kitchen. However, most people do so because the benefit outweighs the concern. Same with smart speakers. Whats the difference from having an Alexa and having your phone on the same counter from a privacy concern perspective? It is effectively 0.

There isn't though. This is just voice control of existing things people are already doing through Amazon. This is data they already have. Is data inherently evil? I don't understand how there is some significantly different privacy concern of using Amazon services (wish lists and purchasing things) via voice control than via their website or app.

There are many legitimate privacy concerns with ever-listening devices in your house, but having "data" from people directly using existing features of a company via voice instead of mouse clicks isn't really one of them.

I doubt they want to start a cell company, more likely it is to have favorable terms for embedding 4G into Echo devices, making car and portable echos possible. They have done this for years w/Kindle, which would also benefit.

I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.

Google is the new 2005 Microsoft

Hotdog or not hotdog

They acquired Android. Waymo and Tensorflow are cool r&d but not businesses.

The real reason is why any large enterprise does something unusual: “it has always been like that”.

Amazon is not a monopoly, Google is. Retail is ENORMOUS and even in the area of online retail, which is still only a minor segment of all retail sales, Amazon still only has something like 30-50% marketshare depending on the type of good/week of the year. There is no "search" outside of the Web and google controls 90%+ of it.

gold is actually used to do things, outside of jewelry its used in various industrial applications (for example, the computer you are using right now). so there is a floor to the value of gold, because its a real commodity. there is no floor to a digital currency with little real world adoption/use.