Amazon after 25 years today announced they’ll be discontinuing Alexa.com.

First up, what Alexa is and isn’t.

It’s not the Amazon Alexa that is sits in a kitchen and answers random questions kids give it when bored.

Alexa.com is a data service made by Amazon that provides easy access to information about the internet. Most commonly used feature by far was its web ranking software, which takes all the websites on the internet and ranks them in order of traffic.

Something which most people who have websites get kind of addicted to checking every month, to see if they made gains or not.

There’s also a premium version of it, which 99% of people using the site never used, that’ll expand that information into regional detail, timeline of growth and offer other services.

Reason it was made.

Amazon originally focused just on selling books, but made the move to music, VHS & DVD’s after they ran surveys with customers and found those were the products they were most interested in.

They began doing the same thing with people selling on Amazon and found most sellers wanted their own websites for different services/details and Amazon launched AWS in 2002.

Which was a really good move in retrospect, where 46 billion dollars was made from AWS in 2020, with 13.5 billion in profit from it.

To put that in perspective, Amazon made 21.3 billion dollars in 2020 for profit, but had 386 billion in revenue.

AWS isn’t even 15% of the revenue, but was over 50% of profit.

For Alexa though, Amazon bought the company for 250 million in 1999 Amazon stock “really hope those guys held on” and used it as a method to funnel clients into what would later be AWS.

Rational behind this was similar to Amazon buying IMBD in 1998 for 55 million dollars, as a move to gain ground in the movie industry, before eventually selling movies and finally producing them.

Alexa as a product was really Amazon knowing they wanted to get into data/web services and thought it’d help that.

Which it did.

Why Amazon is getting rid of it?

No official reason was given, but have three ideas why.

Andy Jassy

Jeff Bezos left Amazon as CEO and Andy Jassy who ran AWS for years took over as CEO.

The guy more or less built the web services division, so my guess would be he personally just found Alexa a distraction that didn’t bring in customers.

It likely felt like one of those small things that bothered someone, which the moment he had the power to, he got rid of, purely out of annoyance.

Better use for the tool.

The value of Alexa to most people was really just seeing web rankings. Basically every project I’ve ever had, I’d spend like 20-30 minutes every other month seeing the alexa scores of competing sites. It’s sort of addicting.

I doubt Amazon gets rid of that tool, but just moves it to something closer to AWS’s actual site, to try and promote that clearer.

Real estate

Obvious elephant in the room.

Since launching in 2014, Amazon has sold over 100 million Alexa’s globally.

It’s become a staple item for a lot of homes, but it also has competition from Google, Sony and other groups.

Having the core product called Alexa, but the .com is associated with a group within amazon that has a completely different team and unrelated product is just stupid.

Something which I think everyone in the company knew and eventually they were going to shut Alexa down.

With that, it’s gone and wondering who replaces them.