From everything I’ve heard, Alexa was an absolutely massive boondoggle inside Amazon, with literally thousands of engineers and hundreds of managers. It’s incredible to think that so many of them spent years there, growing through the ranks of Amazon, without ever building anything resembling a real business. This really shows exactly how unfair the playing field is for anyone competing with big tech - there’s no pressure for them to make money for years at a time, when everyone else has to actually fight to survive.