Disrupted

Piotr Cichosz

Disruptive technology isn't always sustainable.

Take, for example, Alexa. Amazon sells its device at cost and with more than 10,000 employees working on the project, it is bleeding cash. Amazon's devices and services unit, which oversees Alexa, had an annual operating loss of $5 billion in recent years, according to a report earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal.

Innovators have failed before, and it may be too soon to deem Alexa a failure, but yearly losses in the billions sure seems like a lot to overcome. But, they are not alone, Siri and Google Assistant are having problems. The idea behind Alexa was that people would buy products suggested by Alexa through Amazon.  Popular Science reports that didn't work out. They go on to say,  A rake of privacy scandals certainly didn’t help and, despite Alexa getting roughly a billion user interactions per week in 2018, they were mostly simple requests to play music or deliver a weather report. Not exactly the kind of asks that can easily be monetized. That year, it lost almost $5 billion.

The problem, Alexa is a stand alone speaker. Siri and Google come standard on smart devices. And the result; Alexa is the third most popular voice assistant. It's hard to compete that way. Amazon announced 10,000 layoffs. Forbes says, The cuts will primarily focus on money-draining units, such as Amazon voice-assistant Alexa and ebook-reader Kindle.

So, what happens when the disruptor gets disrupted by an economic reality? Other innovations and  innovators take over. The market is littered with innovative failures. Here are four from Under 30 CEO.

With the exception of Windows Vista, I'm not sure I remember any of these.

• Facebook Phone
• Navdy
• Windows Vista
• Nike+ Fuel Band

In my world, broadcasting, there's been several innovations cast aside on the media highway.

• AM Stereo
• Quad FM
• HD Radio
• Beta Max 
• 3D TV
• Digital Audio Tape (R-DAT)

Then again, maybe the next big thing wasn't really measuring up to expectations. 

Did you buy any of these? I did. I bought a Beta Max.