Jeff Bezos is the Abraham Lincoln of the business world: he doesn’t let critics stop him from making history.
The success of the Amazon Echo encapsulates his resiliency perfectly. eMarketer recently reported that Echo owns more than 70 percent of the market for voice-assisted devices, whose usage grew nearly 130 percent in 2016. During 2017, 35.6 million Americans will use voice-activated assistants at least once a month, which means 25 million of them will use Echo. And during the 2016 holiday season, Amazon sold nine times as many Echo devices as it did the year before. But the ascendance of Echo was hardly assured when Amazon launched the product in November 2014.
In fact, Amazon’s Echo caused a good deal of criticism, ranging from concerns about violations of personal privacy to skepticism over its value to do anything useful for its owners.
Echo Faces a Rocky Start
The Echo surfaced at a time when Bezos was fielding taking heat for the failure of the Amazon Fire phone, which Amazon had released earlier in 2014. And although the Echo made some positive impressions coming out of the gate, the product didn’t exactly overwhelm the media influencers. The voice-activated speaker inspired bemused reactions from publications that were not quite sure what to make of it, including The Verge, which described Echo as “a crazy speaker that talks to you.” An analyst at Wedbush Securities told Bloomberg, “I think it’s just a two-way speaker, but why isn’t there an app that lets me do the same thing without having to spend $99 on hardware? I think this is a solution that is seeking a problem.” And Consumer Reports criticized the Echo for being too rudimentary.
