[ryandrake]

> "Shopping with your voice" never took off despite many attempts.

We're seeing this more and more in tech: Company comes out with a feature that few people want. It doesn't gain adoption. They make many attempts to cajole and nudge users to use the feature. Users don't use the feature. They make more buttons and flows trigger the feature. Users ignore them. They start tricking users into using the feature, with dark patterns and misleading buttons. Users deliberately learn and avoid these. Exasperated, they declare "Why, oh why, won't users just use this feature!? They're just uninformed or don't know what's good for them!"

Whatever happened to starting with what the user actually wants and then working backwards from that to the actual feature? More and more, companies are more interested in serving their own metrics than serving their users.

[mason55]

Lots of companies still work like you said. With a company like Amazon, though, you have two things at play.

The first is that it takes a massive amount of dollars to make an impact on revenue. You're just not going to move the needle by selling a new product or something. It's a mature business and to meaningfully increase your revenues you need to alter people's current behavior so they spend more.

But, the second thing, is that if you manage to increase revenue by a percentage point, that is a huge amount of money, and that potential payoff can justify a huge investment. And once you've made that investment, there's a lot of incentive to try to make it work (between sunk cost fallacy and potential payoff).

Lots and lots and lots of companies fail because they build something that doesn't solve a need. It's like the number one thing you learn. This is nothing new. It's just that in the age of hyperscaled tech companies, the payoff for unlocking a new market or changing user behavior is huge, so you end up with lots of attempts to develop some technology and then figure out how to use it to change the world.

[JohnFen]

I actually think this sort of thing is a huge part of SV-style companies are increasingly viewed in a poor light by normal people.

It's hubris. The mindset takes "People don't know what they want. We do." far, far too seriously.

[edmundsauto]

I think it’s much more nuanced. Remember Ford’s “we make cars in everyone’s favorite colors (As long as it’s black)”

When you’re making a product you have to spin up the flywheel with marketing in order to get accurate feedback from customers.

The previous method was to use focus groups to make new products. That was far worse.

Even harder, nowadays the biggest impact comes from platforms instead of products. Multi-sided marketplaces are even more challenging.

It’s not hubris, it’s collective complexity, increasingly sophisticated consumers, and less low hanging fruit.

[JohnFen]

> The previous method was to use focus groups to make new products. That was far worse.

I actually don't think that was worse at all, and focus groups should come back into the equation. Not as the only measure, of course, but they were never the only measure.

[edmundsauto]

The problem with focus groups is 1) people say they want different things than they actually do, and 2) it's rarely representative, you'd need thousands of people. Then, once scaled, you lose details because it has to be more survey-like. Add in the leadership team's "vision" and you have a recipe for only making products for e.g. white men and ignoring the black woman haircare market.

It all has a place - but actual real data is probably the best way to figure out product market fit in my experience.

[denimnerd42]

they want you to shop with your voice because there is a lot of friction if you then decide that's not what you really wanted. most people if they mistakenly order something with alexa will just let it be delivered, not cancel it.

same with using a mobile app to shop. you have less ability to cross shop quickly because the interface is inherently slower than a mouse and keyboard plus the OS multi tasking features are horrible. plus they get a lot more information about you with their app.

so it's not always that they think the feature is better for you, it may just be that it's better for them.