Amazon senior vice president of gadgets and services David Limp will be leaving the company"before the end of the year," according to an Amazon spokesperson speaking with The Wall Street Journal. Limp has actually been with the company given that 2010and has actually supervised the advancement of major Amazon tasks like the Echo clever speakers, the Alexa voice assistant, the Fire tablets and Fire TV gadgets, and the Amazon Appstore.
Amazon's very first Kindle e-readers pre-date Limp's period, but the business's items ever since have all followed the exact same fundamental formula: to drive more sales on Amazon. Hardware like the Fire tablets, Fire TV sticks, and Echo clever speakers are basically cost expense, with the hopes that they'll create earnings once they're in users' houses.
If individuals utilize them in ways that do not make cash for Amazon, the problem with that technique is that even phenomenally successful items can fail. That's the story of the Echo clever speaker and Alexa voice assistant, which as of late 2022 had actually apparently lost Amazon some $10 billion because individuals mainly use Alexa to play music and check the weather condition and not to spend money.
Limp has actually also supervised a few straight-out failures like the Halo physical fitness gadgets and, most especially, 2014's Fire Phone. In spite of a substantial marketing push (for a time, even the tape on Amazon's boxes was pressing Fire Phone sales), average software, a bad app community, and an absence of distinct features meant that the phone never caught on. Amazon had to dump its remaining Fire Phone stock at a portion of its initial rate, and the company never attempted a follow-up.
In addition to Amazon's homegrown hardware, Limp has also supervised the acquisition of several customer hardware business, consisting of Eero (routers and networking), Ring and Blink (outdoor and indoor security electronic cameras), and iRobot (Roombas and other cleaning robots). Jointly, these hardware jobs can offer Amazon a wide-open window to all type of data about you and your house, power that the business and its employees have periodically abused.
Limp's departure caps a rough year for Amazon's gadgets and services division, which has been hit especially hard by recent layoffs. The Wall Street Journal says the company has cut roughly 27,000 tasks in the last year as post-Bezos CEO Andy Jassy has actually cut costs in money-losing divisions (according to The New York Times, this means practically every department besides Amazon Web Services and the company's advertising service).
Amazon's hardware service does not seem to be in any danger of disappearing right now; the business revealed four brand-new Echo devices and the large-screened Fire Max 11 tablet in May, and brand-new Kindle e-readers like the Kindle Scribe are launched at a stable clip. But it appears we'll be seeing fewer odd long-shots like the Amazon Astro robot, which was at first revealed in late 2021 but is still just readily available to the general public as a $1,600 invite-only preview.