Amazon
- Amazon debuted the Echo smart speaker in late 2014, and in the subsequent years it’s become a near-ubiquitous device in homes — "more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices" have been sold so far, Amazon says.
- But the device was a major risk for Amazon at the time. "No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in the company’s recently published annual letter to shareholders.
- It’s this concept of "wandering" — taking big risks on new ventures — that Bezos said is central to Amazon’s continued success.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and its voice assistant Alexa were not a sure thing when they first debuted back in 2014.
A small speaker with built-in microphones, connected to the internet, that lives in my house? No thank you!
That sentiment is far from normal nowadays; over 100 million devices with Alexa built in have been sold in the last five years. It is another hugely successful product from Amazon, alongside the Kindle and Amazon Prime.
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But in 2013?
"No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering," Bezos said in his annual letter to shareholders. "If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said ‘No, thank you.’"
That high risk mentality is crucial to Amazon’s strategy.
As Bezos put it in the letter: "As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle."
In the case of the Echo and Alexa, a major failure with the Amazon Fire phone was turned into a major success with the Echo and Alexa.
"Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa," Bezos said.
Over 100 million devices later and that pivot was a massive success.
Read more from Jeff Bezos’ 2019 letter to Amazon shareholders:
- Jeff Bezos just sent out his annual letter to Amazon shareholders — read it here
- Jeff Bezos says independent sellers on Amazon are ‘kicking’ the online retail giant’s ‘butt’ in sales
- Jeff Bezos made a jab at eBay in his annual shareholder letter, boasting that ‘independent sellers do so much better selling on Amazon’
- Jeff Bezos says Amazon ‘remains a small player’ in retail after the company posted revenues of $233 billion last year
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says multibillion-dollar failures are actually a good thing: ‘If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle’
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See Also:
- There’s a simple way to make sure Amazon workers can’t listen to what you say to Alexa — here’s how to do it
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says multibillion-dollar failures are actually a good thing: ‘If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle’
- Amazon workers reportedly get to hear some of what you tell Alexa, and they have a chat room to talk about ‘amusing’ recordings
SEE ALSO: Jeff Bezos just sent out his annual letter to Amazon shareholders — read it here
Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Ben Gilbert)