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Amazon Is Hiring More Developers For Alexa Than Google Is Hiring For Everything (gadgetsnow.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gadgets Now: Amazon is hiring 1,147 people just for its Alexa business. To put this number in perspective, it has to be mentioned that this number is higher than what Google is hiring for technical and product roles across its Alphabet group of companies including YouTube and Waymo. According to a report published in Forbes, Amazon is hiring engineers, data scientists, developers, analysts, payment services professionals among others. The Forbes report cites information released by Citi Research in association with Jobs.com. It's clear that Amazon is betting big on the smartphone speaker market if the hiring numbers are to go by. It was the first major company to come with a smart speaker and has almost 70% market share in the U.S. Google has been making in-roads with Google Home devices but still has a lot of catching up to do. The Citi report further mentions that other notable areas where Amazon is hiring are devices, advertising and seller services. Amazon is looking at hiring a total of about 1,700 employees for other divisions.
Hopefully, the trend of voluntarily putting a bug in one's home will flop like a lead balloon. If someone gave me an Echo for free, I'd use it for softball practice.
Nowadays I mostly use it to read the time when I'm in a hurry. That's it.
Maybe 1500 fresh engineers will result in something more useful.
Like adding motion sensors to notice when you're in a hurry so your Echo Plus can proactively tell you the time.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
After Amazon burns through a few million in salaries, there will be big layoffs and they will move on to the next "big thing".
Google is a dying company. They started dying when they started caring about other things more than technology. They can sit there drinking that sweet advertising revenue stream for a long time caring about whatever they want, but eventually it will catch up to them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Everyone knows you can just snap your fingers and hire piles of capable engineers who deliver excellent products!
And how many thousands of Staffers does Google|Alphabet have whose sole job is to hire Engineers. I would bet more than the 1147 temporary people that Amazon is hiring.
Is there ever a decent|accurate Forbes article on Slashdot?
Unlike the other, Alexa actually sells stuff by the billions and not only tells you the weather you see outside the window.
I have an Echo Plus at home, and after one hour of trying to make it sing or say funny things the enthusiasm quickly wears off.
Nowadays I mostly use it to read the time when I'm in a hurry. That's it.
Maybe 1500 fresh engineers will result in something more useful.
This is EXACTLY why Alexa needs 1,147 people to work on her.
The current CEO just plain SUX and is missing opportunity after opportunity. Worst yet, by the time that larry takes action, google will not only have lost their reputation for being bleeding edge, but they will likely have lost most of their top tech ppl that make things happen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Their *real* mechanical turk ... some live dudes with headsets and voice changers power Alexa!
They missed a golden opportunity to hire exactly 1337 employees to work on Alexa.
"So if we hire twice as many people features will take half the time, right?" -Manager
"*Hysterical laughter*" -Programmer
...again.
This graph [statista.com] of Google's quarterly revenues certainly doesn't look like what you would expect from a dying company.
Doesn't matter how much money you make if you are irrelevant. The money will not last forever... just ask Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The numbers in the original "report" are hilariously wrong. Just a few minutes of checking authoritative sources would have told you that.
I'm reminded of a Yogi Berra quote. "Nobody goes to that restaurant any more, it's always too crowded."
How exactly are Google and Microsoft irrelevant?
If Microsoft were really irrelevant, we wouldn't be talking about them. Microsoft absolutely dominates the business world. Windows still runs on 82% of desktop computers worldwide. Microsoft Office so dominates the business market that nobody else even matters. Sure, Bing and Edge are jokes, but Microsoft hasn't exactly died either.
Microsoft is the 3rd largest company by market capitalization, just after Apple and Alphabet. It's 42 years old. You may not like it, but MS is an unequivocal business success.
I received an Echo Dot as a present recently. I'm actually surprised by how much I use it.
The biggest use tends to be in the mornings, when I'm preparing breakfast and lunch for the wife and daughter. While I'm buttering bread and slicing cheese I get my Flash Briefing, a traffic report, a weather report, and then have Alexa turn on my TV and surround sound system, switch them to the correct inputs, and automatically switch to the morning cartoon channel my daughter prefers, all with a single command.
Outside of the morning, it's nice to be able to get music on command, or listen to my favourite podcast, or start my favourite radio station. I have full control of my entertainment centre, and hope to add some lighting control soon as well..
I will agree however that currently the vast bulk of Alexa skills are trivial junk. There are some key ones for integrating with various home control systems, but the vast majority of skills are just sound effects, useless trivia, or silly games of the sort that you get bored of 10 minutes after you install them. I've avoided these myself, but when you look through Amazon's list of Alexa skills and this appears to be 95% of the skill base, it does bring you a bit of despair.
I should note the ability to make phone calls is interesting, although I've only once used it for such (to call the person who sent it as a gift). The intercom capability might be useful if we ever add another to our setup. It's both a strength and a weakness that you have to have the computation for the skills run through AWS (a strength because of the easy to develop skills, and Amazon provides everything you need; a weakness because you can't avoid it, and you can't easily integrate your own devices without exposing them to the cloud. I've really been wanting to figure out a good way to write a skill that can tell me how last nights builds at work turned out, but it's not readily possible as the system lives behind a corporate firewall).
Yaz
They maybe hiring way more, but who'll be there after a year? I doubt same %% as @ GOOG.
You made my point. Lots of money, yet these days how do they matter?
The decline is not yet here, but basically inevitable. No-one bases anything on what Microsoft does these days, they are not driving the industry any longer, so all they can do is follow the market and stay as affluent as possible - they can draw from the same bar IBM's been drinking at for a while now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
nuff said.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.