Amazon is bricking $2,350 Astro robots 10 months after release
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I know Steve Jobs had some success with the whole "telling the customer what they want" thing, but maybe actually talking (and listening) to people before designing and launching your product should be standard procedure for the rest of us?
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so they just bricked a whole line of them, because it wasn't profitable enough. But its totally ok to by the consumer version, because "trust us"....
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lawsuits, LOTS of lawsuits. Of course, lawsuits have always been amazon's primary product.
Its not bezos either, because ceo hero worship is on the same level as eating out of a toilet. Anyone who thinks everything successful a company does is because of that one guy on top is a little off.
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I find the connected devices world gives us many examples of why we should be wary of such devices and services.
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The pistol can be used to forcibly brick your Alexa devices when they pull they plug next year, and then it can do itself last. Bonus points if it forces the printer at gunpoint to print a shipping label for the recycler.
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The cover image of the little camera bot "on patrol" inside a warehouse is amazon telling on themselves.
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I use Alexa every day. To set timers, and turn my lights and heating on and off. If they put any of that stuff behind a subscription, I’ll probably spend even more money on Mycroft and lots more time on Home Assistant.
I’d like a robot, but unless it can cook and clean and keep me company, it’s just a toy.
Hmmm… perhaps what I really want is a 1950s housewife? No, that’s insane. Maybe I’ll just buy a dishwasher.
I’d like a robot, but unless it can cook and clean and keep me company, it’s just a toy.
Hmmm… perhaps what I really want is a 1950s housewife? No, that’s insane. Maybe I’ll just buy a dishwasher.
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But thats the thing, why would you not want to just put up cameras instead? Why pay $2k+ for this robot instead that offers no real advantage over multiple stationary cameras?
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Seems like a bad deal for business security. $2,350 could buy a lot of cameras. Nowadays, like a bazillion or so.
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I certainly dont think that; it was a reference to a significant amount of time. But also since you mention this, he(and his now ex-wife) is the one who turned it from a used bookstore into what it now.
I still use Amazon only for buying used books and Prime video
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Cause robots are cool and cameras are boring?
Maybe stick a flamethrower on it and leash it to the flamethrower dog robot. A camera can't do that!
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This would be a great little toy for the office. Have it run around and give messages or do on the go video conferences or have it look for someone in the office not at their desk or greet visitors and answer simple pre-programed questions. I can think of dozens of things it could do that would make the office a nicer place. Just none that will impact the bottom line in an easily measurable way for MBA with no real world experience doing the specific jobs.
Amazon should open up an API for these and see what the community could do. Better than e-wasting them. And if the community does a good enough job and they get popular, maybe they can keep making them or license out the design.
Amazon should open up an API for these and see what the community could do. Better than e-wasting them. And if the community does a good enough job and they get popular, maybe they can keep making them or license out the design.
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it was a stupid product with a stupid price, so no real surprises here except that the business learned early enough and decided to cut their losses. Maybe they learned something from Alexa.
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Looks like this is an after effect of the Alexa debacle. If [x] doesn’t make a big profit, it gets pushed off a cliff — and the faster, the better. Amazon’s one huge success was AWS.
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I wonder if there's a loophole where you can't put cameras in private places like employee bathrooms but a "robot guard" is just following a patrol route, totally not the same when it checks on you in there.
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no.. a camera is a camera.
I guess the robot can go into radioactive areas or something where humans can't, but the robot dogs are probably better for that.
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A mobile patrol camera scales much better in terms of distance/area. In this specific case that's zero advantage because it's limited to such a ludicrously paltry tiny amount of space (71x71 ft lol!). But I can definitely think about how if it could handle more serious terrain outdoors and run for a few miles at a time (charging itself back up as needed) it could be very helpful particularly if AI could be used to spot "interesting differences" in specified areas. On the farm for example if it could routine travel around and bring attention to holes/breaks in fences or where branches had landed on them, or in my sugar grove if it could notice that a tap had pulled from a tree or deer had gone through lines or something. Or if it could patrol around and through multiple buildings (maybe with automatic interfacing with smart door systems, or if it's small its own "pet door") particularly in less visited underground areas and always keep an eye out for any signs of pipe failure, water showing up on the floor or walls, that sort of thing. A couple of grand for something that worked would be nothing.
In an adversarial role for security monitoring yeah it doesn't seem to make any sense vs either fixed cameras or flying drones, whose intermittency trades for speed and air coverage. But there's a fair amount of human time sucked up by sheer "checking an area occasionally to see if there are any problems", and cost from things not being noticed fast enough. There are now more expensive automated options developing for sure for government and bigger businesses, but a <$10k one that worked well could have a market though not necessarily one Amazon would find big enough maybe.
I'm putting aside here concern about Amazon spying and subscriptions and dropping support while bricking and so on and so forth, since that's not inherent to "mobile robot camera" as a technology though it could be another reason that people wouldn't trust any investment in this specific one.
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And they think cramming AI in it and putting stuff behind a paywall will help them "win"?
I don't exactly know what people want out of an alexa device but I'm pretty sure that's not it. 90% of my use is as a timer or asking the weather. Sometimes we will ask it to Google something or spell something. Any of that becomes a paid service then the trash it is.
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Is there proof they ever sold a single one of these things? There might not even be any customers to refund.
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Hey, let’s build a home robot!
Brilliant!!!
<months later>
Huh this isn’t penciling out. Maybe we should target businesses.
Brilliant!!!
<months later>
So this REALLY isn’t penciling out. Go back to home use?
Brilliant!!!
If you’re an Amazon employee working on this project, start applying for jobs yesterday.
Brilliant!!!
<months later>
Huh this isn’t penciling out. Maybe we should target businesses.
Brilliant!!!
<months later>
So this REALLY isn’t penciling out. Go back to home use?
Brilliant!!!
If you’re an Amazon employee working on this project, start applying for jobs yesterday.
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Speaking of Bezos and hardware launches, this is the 10th anniversary of the Fire Phone, which was a disaster.
arstechnica.com
But in general it was just a different era under Bezos as Amazon wasn’t expected to produce profit in the low interest environment. The best example would be Alexa which was thought be a very successful product until Amazon realized there was no good way to monetize it a decade later. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/
Review: Amazon’s Fire Phone offers new gimmicks, old platform growing pains
Firefly, Dynamic Perspective are great ideas that can't close the ecosystem gap.
arstechnica.com
But in general it was just a different era under Bezos as Amazon wasn’t expected to produce profit in the low interest environment. The best example would be Alexa which was thought be a very successful product until Amazon realized there was no good way to monetize it a decade later. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/
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But one that loads and unloads itself please. And about the wife bot…
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Commercial grade cameras are $500 to $4000 plus installation. These are wired, impact resistant, jamming resistant, dazzle resistant, high reliability, have hardened security, and have several forms of tamper detection.
If you put a bunch of cheap Hikvision cameras in your building, people would hack or disable them to pass time. They'd be a liability more than anything else.
I can see why the robot would be both desirable and a failure. It has no installation costs but it also seems to have no defenses.
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Amazon was long said to be lagging behind Google when it came to hardware products (remember the failure of the Fire Phone?) but here we can see that they are finally catching up to Google's ability to cancel a project in record time. Pretty soon they'll be canceling them the day that they launch, and then they'll move on to canceling even before they launch!
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The main problem, I think, is that the average person doesn't want intrusive, all-seeing robots lurking wherever they are.
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That would be a terrific animated short, like Love, Death & Robots
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Why on Earth would someone buy the home version of this robot for $1600 if they killed the business version after less than a year?!
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We have a problem; fund managers' obsession with growth is destroying society.
We don't have companies chasing 'innovation', we have companies chasing growth.
Amazon probably shouldn't be making robots, Apple shouldn't have been making cars.
If it wasn't for the pernicious connection of CEO bonuses to share price, and hedge fund managers connection of share price to growth (and hence CEO bonuses to growth), we wouldn't have this nonsense.
And we might have a culture where big rich companies invested in innovative startups instead of swallowing them whole! Amazon could be Amazon, and let the little robot dog company be the little robot dog company, but with a billion Amazon dollars.
Then we could have companies concentrating on being profitable instead of growing.
We could have startups which tried to have profitability instead of taking a loss on every signup but planning to implement monopolistic pricing once they've destroyed their competitors. Or just burning through VC cash.
It doesn't have to be this way, growth is a fetish for fund managers its' not required for capitalism or the share market. It's a relatively recent fad, before the 80's everyone invested like Warren Buffet.
We don't have companies chasing 'innovation', we have companies chasing growth.
Amazon probably shouldn't be making robots, Apple shouldn't have been making cars.
If it wasn't for the pernicious connection of CEO bonuses to share price, and hedge fund managers connection of share price to growth (and hence CEO bonuses to growth), we wouldn't have this nonsense.
And we might have a culture where big rich companies invested in innovative startups instead of swallowing them whole! Amazon could be Amazon, and let the little robot dog company be the little robot dog company, but with a billion Amazon dollars.
Then we could have companies concentrating on being profitable instead of growing.
We could have startups which tried to have profitability instead of taking a loss on every signup but planning to implement monopolistic pricing once they've destroyed their competitors. Or just burning through VC cash.
It doesn't have to be this way, growth is a fetish for fund managers its' not required for capitalism or the share market. It's a relatively recent fad, before the 80's everyone invested like Warren Buffet.
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Why is it unfortunate? And unfortunate for whom? A ridiculous junk product has failed. Amazon has screwed a few foolish customers who're now invested in an obsolescent platform that was never anything more than a consumer thirst trap. This is hardly the first time. "Fire Phone," anyone? The moribund Alexa? The Dash scanner?
I long for the Feds to take the Bezos universe apart with a crowbar. Among other things, it would force their lunatic hardware efforts to succeed or fail, rather than releasing trash propped up by Leviathan.
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