Amazon is bricking $2,350 Astro robots 10 months after release

They are refunding for them. But in my opinion, you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has.

Amazon has cancelled lots of consumer stuff in the past (the Alexa buttons or whatever they were) but cancelling business-facing things is new. Businesses are much more cancellation averse than forgetful consumers have proven to be.

I've actually seen one of these in person (the guy had it for free because he knew someone at Amazon working on the personal dogfood version).

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was actually for, and neither could he, as it was basically solely a party trick for him. They don't even vacuum floors like a Roomba does!

The linked article talks about security patrols or whatever, but simply installing security cameras is cheaper and better. A robot obviously rolling along the floor is easy to avoid or to disable.

Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud?

Maybe it’s cost prohibitive to produce something like this robot at tiny scale, but it seems like the best way to develop would be to identify a few partner businesses, super serve them well and then sell to general public.

Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody [1].

To be fair, maybe that’s what they are doing with their home product. And to be doubly fair, building a subscription billing product is far more straightforward than introducing a new category.

[1] https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-culture-of-excellen...

This type of thing is bad for the internal innovator who must expend political capital to get their organization to try new things. “Hey boss, Amazon has this new thing we should try.”

Burn those people a few times and they’re gone forever.

Microsoft is the king of enterprise because they support their products.

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Skype for Business is still supported!

Discontinuing the product is one thing, but intentionally bricking the existing ones (and leaving it up to the former owners to dispose of the resulting e-waste) seems uncalled for to me.

This is exactly the same thing they did with the Amazon Glow Projector.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/20/23415167/amazon-glow-sup...

If someone sends me one of these dead units I'd be happy to work on creating OSS software to run it ... And perhaps it would be a great challenge for our FIRST robotics team during the off-season!

> Per Amazon's emails, the company is still keen to release the home version of Astro

Maybe they find it easier to convince consumers to let amazon spy on them and their homes than it is to convince businesses to let amazon spy on what happens in the office, or maybe the data they were collecting from businesses doesn't seem like it's be as valuable to them as the data they'll collect by putting a mobile camera and microphone in households.

This is going to be the new norm from big tech firms. After the massive layoffs there's just no capacity left for these quixotic speculative products inside major tech companies. What remains of their labor force is focusing on their core business areas.

The last these bets is AI, which already has Wall Street recoiling at the cost.

My employer exists because one day Amazon didn’t feel like supporting their warehouse robot b2b anymore. I have a sense that they do this kind of thing to use companies as Guinea pigs. They experiment and then abandon the product and take the lessons elsewhere.

> autonomously patrol spaces up to 5,000 square feet with an HD periscope and night vision, it could carry small devices

please, tell me someone had an armed response Astro video somewhere

Amazon could reduce this PR disaster by organising to give returned Astros to school programming clubs. Along with a way to hack the firmware, of course.

"Google", as a verb, should begin transitioning to mean 'cancel product':

Amazon have googled Astro robots.

This really ought not be allowed. If you take a product off the market and stop supporting it, you should release the code and support information to enable people who bought it to keep it viable. Subscription models and clever contractual arrangements are bullshit fig leaves for companies trying to have their cake and eat it too.

After this who on earth would trust the "home" version will stick around?

what's the bricking part here?

will the robots receive a self-destruct command (real bricking), or will required external APIs be shut down (effectively bricking, but with a possibility of third-party service resurrection) ?

At this point sell-brick-refund is starting to sound like a capital-raising model. Get cash and customer data and maybe some other buy in and then return it after 1 year. Keep profits.

Is anyone surprised? This part of Amazon has been setting money on fire for years. It hasn’t stopped the people involved from being rewarded though. Amazon employees complain about how the teams in this part of the company get essentially all the headcount or resources they request and build up giant teams that do busy work and get promoted. But they’ve failed to build even one sustainable business. For those who got promoted, this part doesn’t matter - they can just move teams or companies and keep their undeserved titles.

reminds me of the Amazon Cloud Cam product. I had over a hundred of those cameras on my rentals, and in one day there useless. Just like how Google is found to be doing this kind of behavior in the past, Amazon now too is the new brand not to trust with any long term investment.

Power to the reverse engineers who will stop this stuff from turning to junk. Death to TOS.

With Astro put to sleep, I'm worried about Rosey the Robot.

> In May 2023, an Amazon representative told Insider that the firm had eyes on the potential of generative AI for Astro.

So... this was a security bot right?

Did they want to use generative AI to hallucinate your security videos instead of, you know, filming them?