I get that Alexa skills weren't successful and aren't getting a lot of usage, but I am always surprised that these services are cited as being very expensive to maintain. For Amazon, what's the realistic cost in hosting these? Or is it that they have teams of people covering the security / oversight etc?
At this juncture, I have to be sceptical that the reason they now want to kill it is because they effectively want to Sherlock them all by shipping LLM based AI functionality instead, and they want to ensure that nobody else does it on their platform before they can.
In my experience there are many reasonable incentives that shut these things down. Execs don’t want the even small maintenance burden on already stretched-thin dev teams (low ROI and bad opportunity costs), and individual devs want to work on the most impactful projects.
At this juncture, I have to be sceptical that the reason they now want to kill it is because they effectively want to Sherlock them all by shipping LLM based AI functionality instead, and they want to ensure that nobody else does it on their platform before they can.