[sokoloff]

OK. I believe you. They accidentally created something else that was very useful but different from what they set out to do.

Is that a story of failure or of success?

Starbucks launched to sell beans and espresso machines. YouTube launched as a video dating site. Are they also failures?

[modeless]

I guess where we disagree is "very useful". If Google Assistant stopped working tomorrow I would hardly care at all. There are a couple of scenarios where it's slightly more convenient than using my phone (assuming I don't encounter one of its many failure modes) and that's about it. I'm sure the hands free aspect is important for certain people in certain situations but I think the vast majority of people just don't see a lot of value from it.

[sokoloff]

Amazon alone has sold over half-a-billion Alexa-enabled units (around 10 of them to me).

I think people see more than $30 of value in them, at least as their revealed preferences suggest.

[modeless]

Those sales were subsidized in expectation of future profitability that will never come (at least not without a ground-up redesign of the product around LLM-based AI agents or some other paradigm). Economically Alexa is a "colossal failure": https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...

[pests]

Yeah, my crock pot and ceiling fan are "Alexa-enabled". That's two.