Let me start by saying this: I love Amazon.com. I've been a Prime member for years and I order a ridiculous number of things from them, from pantry items to electronics.

But they're failing at consumer electronics.

The Kindle ereaders have clearly been their best devices, but ever since then they've gone further and further downhill. The first Kindle Fire was the worst tablet I've ever used, and that includes the first Archos Android tablet that didn't have the Google app store on it and a screen that was hard to read. I do think their Fire tablets have gotten better, but even with good hardware they still don't make sense to me. In the Venn diagram of Android apps, there's a circle for apps in the Amazon App Store that is nearly completely surrounded by the circle of apps in the Google Play Store. So why not just get a Nexus 7 or 9 and call it a day? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Then they did the Fire Phone, which made even less sense to me and apparently didn't make sense to anyone else because Amazon has taken a giant loss on it.

Now I just happen to notice an add on their home page for the Amazon Echo, a cylindrical tower that's designed to sit in your home and listen for your voice commands. It then does searches and plays music and add stuff to your to do list blah blah blah. It's basically a $200 Google Now/Siri device that you can't move.

It seems like Echo was designed and built before Amazon saw Google and Apple adding the ability for people to initiate voice commands on their phones hands-free. Yes, iPhones and most Android phones need to be plugged in when doing this, but so does Echo. I'm sure that Echo was also designed before Amazon lost a ton of money on the Fire Phone.

I don't mind that Amazon is trying to do new things in the consumer electronics space, but they sure seem to be missing the mark and designing products that nobody needs or wants. If I'm going to have a $200 monolith in my home, I'm going to start with the Sonos Play:1 and start a usefull home speaker system, not a device that does less than what my phone does already.

Can someone explain the appeal of this device to me?