Amazon eyes devices group as it undertakes broad cost cutting

The business looked like it was being played from the outside. The company's home consumer hardware is a good way to get Amazon's voice assistant into millions of homes. No division of a corporation is safe from cost cutting when the economy is not doing well.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon could be the next company to be hit with cuts as the company braces for more macroeconomic disruption. According to some of the people cited in the paper, some of the leadership at Amazon is evaluating the company's business.

Long-tail products have been the focus of many of the cutbacks. Devices is a mature division for the company and has a wide range of products.

Amazon said that the normal performance review is being impacted by the financial climate.

The company writes that they are excited about the future of their larger businesses and newer initiatives. An annual operating plan review is part of the senior leadership team's review of investment outlook and financial performance. As part of this year's review, we're taking into account the current macro- environment and looking at opportunities to maximize costs.

There is a second comment that highlightsAlexa's successes.

Alexa started as an idea on a whiteboard. In less than a decade, it’s turned into an AI service that millions of customers interact with billions of times each week in different languages and cultures around the world. Even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased by more than 30%. We’re as optimistic about Alexa’s future today as we’ve ever been, and it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon.

Cutting costs is not an easy task in any economy. The CEO highlighted the ups and downs of the category in his letter, including an insight into the life of the Fire phone, which was unsuccessful.

Jassy wrote about the division's future.

Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives.