letter to santa
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man’s hat. And the great news this festering season is that, if you can’t remember to do that, don’t worry as the Amazon Echo is now here to remind you of the task. Retail consumerism obviously has to create imaginary scenarios where products appear invaluable to our very existence and ‘Alexa’, or Voice Assistants as is the generic term, has surely to be the most illogical extension of today’s retail-therapy obsessed society.
Yes, it’s sleek, innocuous and, apparently, won’t dominate a room but what exactly is the point? It can wake me up or I could set my alarm. It can read me the news or I could listen to Radio Five Live and catch News at Ten on the tele. It can play music or I could pick a CD, switch a channel and hit the play button. It can answer all my general knowledge questions or I could start reading again and increase my own personal knowledge. It can operate my radiators or I could use the timer. It can compile a shopping list and send it to my smart-phone (if I had one) or I could indeed write one out with pen & paper as I scour my empty cupboards. It can order me a Just Eat takeaway or I could get off my fat lazy bottom and make myself a lovely home-cooked meal with all the shopping I’ve just bought.
Now, I fully get that I’m not the ‘targeted demographic’ but thankfully, I can honestly say that I don’t know anyone, not one single person, that this gadget would either appeal to or would make use of. I do hope Bezos is not intending to turn Amazon into a profitable business with this useless bit of tat. Once upon a time we used to say that cocaine was God’s way of telling you, you had more money than sense. Now, at £150, I think Alexa more than achieves the same, and with such lovely diction.
“I once heard a salesman use the term ” most people only use 10% of the functionality of word / excel” as part of a sales pitch. Disregarding his sales tactics, he has got a point.
We all use word / excel, but beyond the basic formula’s / fonts, bullet points etc. the majority of us don’t utilise the full potential of either product, i doubt anyone of us even truly understands all that MS Office has to offer, or really cares! No one seems to have an issue with this. “Word” was welcomed and fully embraced, back in the 80’s. Do you know anyone solely using Notepad as some sort of 1 man protest against over spec’d products.
roll on 30 odd years… an the Amazon echo arrives. In its basic form it’s a wireless speaker, an audio extension to a phone, TV, tablet, alarm clock, weather & news app etc, functionality we would all use daily. Even Carl sets his alarm clock three times a week!
Yes you can talk to it, Yes it can order you an Uber or pizza, turn lights, heating, fans on or off. In fact it can act has the central hub for all your in-house tech but it doesn’t have to!
So my question to you is what’s actually changed ? Your bathroom mirror might have the answer ;)”
Adam, Security tech and squash junior
“Stone Age Man lives on!
To fully embrace your philosophy Carl, you really need to sell your bike(s)/car and start walking everywhere; sell your CD player and learn to sing in tune or play an instrument (properly!). I was going to suggest binning all your biros and modern day writing implements, but I know you still write with a quill!….oh, and your mobile phone must go – the carrier-pigeon did the job perfectly adequately – and often more reliably than Vodafone!
I think we should welcome Alexa and all other exploration, and excuse the (not so) occasional faux pas. Let them happen and let everyone have a choice. Useless things get found-out…”
Steve, Caravaner
“Bizarrely enough I had a beer with the owner of a marketing agency the other day and he was on cloud 9 as his Echo had just been delivered. As he is just buying Chris Boardman’s house near Manchester (for non-cyclists Boardman is a gold Olympian and an even more successful businessman) I assume my buddy does indeed have more money than sense. I pressed him on why he thought the Echo was a good idea, along the lines in your post Carl, and I succeeded in somewhat deflating his bubble. Frankly he couldn’t articulate why he needed it except to say he’d be hooking it up to his Sonos so he could tell Echo to tell Sonos to play whatever he wanted at a whim.
It all sounded a bit complicated to me. Muzak in every room has little interest for me. I don’t want my house wired so that every room I go into has the same music playing. In fact I don’t want to walk into a room with music already playing at all. It would be too much like being in a shopping mall. I like the process of selecting a CD, or at a stretch scrolling through iTunes, and consciously selecting an album or track and then really listening to it with attention rather than it being in the background like elevator music.
As for the Echo, I blame my wife really. Her cousin headed up the development of the pesky device at Amazon Lab126 where the geeky stuff is created. Having foisted some unnecessary tech on the world he has had the good grace to jump ship and is now heading up Googles’s hardware division. Smart lad. Expect to see other such solutions looking for a problem from that other behemoth of the tech industry.”
Dave. Knows better