HACKER Q&A
📣 aritraghosh007

Why did Amazon buy Alexa?


In 1999, one can understand Amazon's need to study patterns around emerging traffic trends in dot com's that could lend to its fledgling online business. Fast forward to 2020, how does Alexa.com fit into Amazon's business model? Does it have anything to do with AWS?

  👤 dangus Accepted Answer ✓
If the acquisition in 1999 made sense (it certainly did), the question might be whether the act of spinning off the company makes sense in 2020.

I don’t have an answer, but I suspect that spinning off the company is just a worse choice than keeping it or shutting it down. Maybe the same concept applies to IMDB.

Perhaps it’s the same reason why Netflix hasn’t spun off DVD Netflix. It’s profitable, but it isn’t attractive to sell to someone else.

I am just speculating.

👤 thirtythree
I was wondering how Amazon can afford Alexa. Running the service must cost a lot and it's not like they can show ads