[TheCowboy]

I sometimes wonder if I'm just biased or if performance really did get worse. It would be cool to have an anonymous Alexa coder or someone who got the axe there chime in as sometimes happens.

But I think the main problem was their entire vision for monetization was just nonsensical according to what I read. So I think they wasted many hours of effort on that front instead of trying to make devices people found enjoyable to use or that actually delivered value by working well.

People don't really want to buy blind via a device if they don't have to, and if they did it would likely come at the substitution of buying directly from the site. They nixed their web interface, and the mobile app performed poorly. They invested talent in coming up with buttons to reorder very specific stuff like laundry detergent, but something like their "Subscribe & Save" seems like a more sensible approach to that problem.

[stackskipton]

We used to buy from Alexa but when Amazon went to shit and we couldn't trust that "Order Tide Pods" would result in similar price/quantity Tide Pods showing up, we stopped doing that.

Plugins would have been great if plugin store didn't look like main Amazon store.

[thomaskang08]

Most people in Alexa don't even believe in the monetization. We are actually building this thing and joking about it at the same time. You can imagine the quality is deteriorating because no one cares about the product anymore.