Has Amazon Hit the Same Big Pothole As Apple?
February 27, 2025
This blog post is the work of a real-live dinobaby. No smart software involved.
Apple has experienced some growing pains with its Apple Intelligence. Incorrect news and assorted Siri weirdness indicated that designing a rectangle and laptop requires different skills from delivering a high impact, mass market smart software “solution.”
I know Apple is working overtime to come up with the next big thing. Will it be another me-too product? Probably. I liked the M1 chip, but subsequent generations have not done much to change my work flow or my happiness with my laptops and Mac Minis. I am okay with a cheap smart watch. I am okay with an old iPhone. I am okay with providing those who do work for me with a Mac laptop. Apple, however, is not a big player in smart software. In China, the company is embracing Chinese smart software. Hey, Apple wants to sell iPhones. Do what’s necessary is the basic approach to innovation in my opinion.
Has Amazon hit the same pothole as Apple? Surely the Bezos bulldozer can move forward with its powerful innovation machine. I am not so sure. I remember four years ago a project requiring my team to look at Amazon’s Sagemaker. That was an initiative to provide off-the-shelf technology and data sets to Amazon cloud customers who wanted smart software. Have you perceived Sagemaker as the big dog in AI? I don’t.
I read “Looks Like the Next-0Gen Alexa’s Release Is Hitting Another Speed Bump.” The write up suggests that the expensive kitchen timer and weather update device is not getting much smarter quickly. The article reports:
According to a tip from an unnamed Amazon employee, shared by the Washington Post (via Android Authority), the smarter Alexa update won’t be released until March 31. The holdup was apparently due to the upgraded assistant tripping over itself in testing, struggling to nail accurate answers. So, it seems like Amazon is taking extra time to fine-tune Alexa’s brain before letting it loose.
I am not too surprised. Amazon fiddles with the Kindle and the software for that device does not meet the needs of people who read numerous books. (Don’t you love those Amazon Kindle email addresses and the software that makes it a challenge to figure out which books are on the device, which are for sale, and which are in the Amazon cloud? Wonderful software for someone who does not read, just buys books.) The cloud AI initiative has not come close to the Chinese technological “strike” with the Deepseek system. Now the kitchen timer is delayed just like useful Apple Intelligence.
Let me share my hypotheses about why Amazon and I suppose I can include Apple in this mental human hallucination:
- Neither company has a next big thing. Both companies are in a me-too, me-too loop. That’s a common situation in a firm which gets big, has money, and loses its genius for everything except making as much money as possible. Innovation atrophy is my phrase for this characteristic of some companies.
- Throwing money at a problem does not create sparks of insight. The novel ideas are smothered under the flow of money that must be spent. This is a middle manager’s problem; specifically, effort is directed to spending the money, not coming up with a big idea that solves a problem and delights those people. Do you know what’s different about a new iPhone? Do you know which Amazon products are actually of good quality? I sure don’t. I ordered an AMD Ryzen CPU. Amazon shipped me red panties. My old iPhone asks me to log in every time I look at Telegram’s messages on the device. Really, panties and persistent log ins?
- General strategic drift. I am not sure what business Apple is in? Is it services like selling music? Is it hardware which is mostly indistinguishable from the hardware just replaced? Is Amazon a cloud computing outfit with leaky S3 storage constructs? Is it a seller of Temu-type products? Is it a delivery business unable to keep its delivery partners happy? The purpose of these firms is to acquire money. Period. The original Jobs and Bezos “razzmatazz” is gone.
Will the companies remediate the fundamental innovation issue? Nope. But both will make a lot of money. Beavers do what beavers do. No matter what. But beavers might be able to get Alexa to spin money, games to mostly work, and Twitch to make creators happy, not grumpy.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2025
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