Re: "The main problems..."
a crappy failing business model that doesn't provide any recurring revenue
I was looking into how the Amazon Echo interacts with other local "smart" devices and this seems to be the other big flaw (the other one being the spy-in-the-room issue). You have two devices that are both connected together on a local network yet the Alexa back-end can only communicate with your home automation hub (for example) via a publicly-accessible webserver - it can't send that data back to the Echo and have it pass it on to the destination device in the same room.
So not only do you have to wonder how Amazon is going to get the recurring revenue to pay for the recurring costs of running Alexa in the cloud, you have to ask the same question about every device it communicates with and has to have a cloud service even if it's merely a conduit for data.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
