Limp himself used the simple tools to code a memory game using the light ring around his Echo.īy 2016, Limp was staggered as he walked the aisles of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. So instead of developing all of Alexa’s features internally, Amazon pivoted to make it easy for outside developers to plug their apps into Alexa’s code, and to plug Alexa’s code into all kinds of third party devices. The team was “moving fast but not fast enough and Jeff thought the only way… was to do similar things to what we did in (Amazon Web Services) for developers,” Limp says. They were adding new areas of knowledge to Alexa but it wasn’t enough to satisfy Bezos.
Open standards can winĮarly on in the life of Alexa, the team’s top leaders met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask for more engineers and to update the boss on their progress. (Second-place Google will trail far behind with less than 25% market share.) That’s quite the turnaround. By the year’s end, according to research firm eMarketer, Amazon will have sold an estimated 49 million smart speakers, capturing 63% of the market. “I’ll take 20 failures like Fire phone if tomorrow you could tell me we have 100% chance of getting another Alexa and Echo,” Limp adds.Īnyone would. “Once you think the product is up to par, you have to get it out in front of customers-knowing that many of those are going to fail.”
“To me it was a good lesson… you have to have conviction when you’re inventing,” Limp says. Limp says Amazon is willing to take risks to see which innovations connect with customers.
Within about a year, it was off the retailer’s web site and gone forever.īoth the Fire phone and the Echo speaker were developed at virtually the same time, and both by Amazon’s Lab126 unit. Despite being crammed with multiple cameras and other gee-whiz features, the Fire Phone was a complete flop. A few months prior to the Echo release in 2014, the company had unveiled its Fire Phone. Failure is an optionīefore Alexa answered it’s first query, Amazon wasn’t exactly known for its hardware prowess. “It’s their new normal,” he says.Įven at a young age, Alexa-and its success-has yielded many lessons for the tech industry. Now Limp says his kids, growing up around all those Alexa devices, expect voice controls everywhere. You’re creating a category, which doesn’t come along in consumer electronics very often.”īut no one, not even Limp, foresaw just how popular Alexa would become or that Amazon would so easily fend off rivals like Apple, Google, and Microsoft as the home digital assistant market grew. “We were creating something new that’s different than just a product. “It was very clear, very quickly that customers really did love this,” Limp tells Fortune in an exclusive interview for Alexa’s fifth anniversary. Amazon says, to date, more than 100 million Alexa-compatible devices have been sold. Consumers, on the other hand, bought them up like M&Ms.