Last week (5th July) Amazon marked its 30 year anniversary, testament to its continued growth and resilience, starting life as a bookstore in 1984 and growing to a billion-dollar company to be reckoned with. For its first quarter of 2024, it announced a 13% increase in net sales to $143.3 billion, compared with $127.4 billion in Q1 2023.
Amazon owns multiple subsidiaries, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Zoox, its self-driving car division, Kuiper Systems, a satellite IoT provider and Amazon Lab126, a provider of computer hardware. Its subsidiary, AWS, that provides Cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals and companies, reported 17% year-on-year sales to $25 billion.
In recent news put out by Amazon, it said that a study it had commissioned and conducted by Accenture, had shown optimising AWS workloads is capable of reducing the carbon footprint of AI workloads by 99%, being four times more efficient than workloads done on-site, which require running hardware and software.
“We are constantly working on ways to increase the energy efficiency of our facilities—optimising our data centre design, investing in purpose-built chips, and innovating with new cooling technologies,” said Chris Walker, Director of Sustainability at AWS in the announcement.
Amazon said that AI workloads will become more data-intensive, require more energy and claimed that on-premises data centres are struggling to keep up. This followed news of Google’s latest annual environmental report in which it admitted a 48% increase in carbon emissions and accredited it to data centres’ energy consumption and supply chain emissions.
In other noticeable milestones, Amazon entered the world of virtual voice assistants when it bought a Polish speech synthesiser known as Ivona, and off the back of that, introduced the Amazon Alexa in 2014 alongside the Echo. In 2023, a new lineup of Echo products were launched to provide customers more choice in how they choose to access Alexa, alongside recording sales of Alexa-enabled devices surpassing over half a billion.
Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa said that use of Alexa increased 35% in 2022 and that the devices “will only continue to get better as we add even more generative AI powered experiences for Alexa throughout the year.”
Amazon said it was a founding member of Matter, the smart home standard that strives for interoperability between different smart devices made by different companies as it expressed sympathy for customers who purchase smart devices and find them incompatible with a smart home ecosystem.
“It’s not an easy job, stitching together all these different experiences with all these different devices and brands, but we think that’s best for customers. That’s why we do the hard work,” said Marja Koopmans, then- Director of Health and Smart Home at Amazon in a 2022 announcement. Koopmans is now Director of the Alexa Enterprise, according to her LinkedIn.
Despite its success in some areas, in other areas Amazon hasn’t been wholly successful. This includes the Amazon Fire Phone launched to compete with smartphones by Apple and Samsung which was discontinued after 2015; Amazon Destinations, a platform designed to assist users with booking holidays that closed in 2015; and Amazon Tap, a portable Bluetooth speaker with Alexa capabilities launched in 2016 that required users to press a button to activate the assistant that was subsequently discontinued in 2018 as the Echo and other devices were preferred for their hands-free functionality.
And in recent news, Amazon decided to discontinue its Astro for Business security bot, designed to provide security for SMEs by patrolling and monitoring premises. In an email sent to customers and reported by TechCrunch, the company said: “We are fully committed to our vision of bringing world-class consumer robotics solutions to the home. To accelerate our progress and ongoing research to make Astro the best in-home robot, we’ve made the decision to wind down support for Astro for Business. We’re excited about the in-home experiences we’re inventing for Astro, and look forward to sharing more in the future.”
The subject of heavy criticism or an inspiring example of how a company got off the ground and went on to challenge giants in the eCommerce space like eBay and Walmart and streaming heavyweights like Netflix, whatever the story, Amazon’s 30-year history represents highs and lows, with the looming question: what will they do next?
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