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Amazon’s family of Echoes keeps growing. From the first can-shaped Echo, to the big-screen Echo Show, and even the cute Echo Dot, you can get Alexa into your home any number of ways. These devices can answer your questions, help you order essentials for your home, play all sorts of audio content, and even function as the control hub for your burgeoning smart home. Here are our favorite Echo and Alexa-compatible speakers for every home and budget.

Updated July 2019: We’ve refreshed this list for Prime Day, with the latest Echo devices. Prices may be lower during the sale. Be sure to check out our picks for Best Smart Speakers, Best Bluetooth Speakers, and Best Google Speakers, as well.

Note: When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

The Best Overall Echo

Amazon Echo Plus ($150)

Amazon

The 2018 Echo Plus is the best-sounding Echo. Like the cheaper second-generation Echo, it has a tweeter and subwoofer, but it sounds impressive enough to justify its $50 premium. The newer 2018 version is also a step up from the original, with smoother bass and treble. If music and audio quality are your jam, the Sonos One is still the speaker to own, but the Echo Plus isn’t bad, especially if you pair it with an Echo Sub ($130).

It’s also the best version to buy if you own smart home devices, thanks to its Zigbee support. Zigbee allows it to directly connect with products in your home that use that standard form of mesh networking—a network created by daisy-chaining devices together. It has a built-in temperature sensor, too.

The Best Echo Smart Display

Amazon Echo Show ($230)

Amazon

The Echo Show has come a long way in a short time. The first Show was a blocky chunk of a device to look at, but the new model is much easier on the eyes. It’s all screen on the front, with a larger 10-inch display, and the rear speakers also sound better and have a fabric covering them.

It may seem odd to buy an Alexa speaker with a display. After using it you’ll understand the appeal. When you ask it for the weather, it tells you and shows you. Alexa’s daily news briefing now has video with it, giving you a quick visual dose of what’s going on in the world, and Amazon added recipe and cooking help to it, too. You can also video call other Echo Shows or watch Amazon Prime videos on it. Lyrics for songs on Amazon Music scroll as they play.

The Best Echo for Voice Only

Amazon Echo Dot ($30)

Amazon

If you want an Alexa speaker, but don’t plan on rocking out with it, the Echo Dot is for you. It’s a hockey puck-shaped speaker that puts out decent spoken audio. The new version has a softer fabric coating its sides and does sound better for music—though still not up to the audio quality of a larger speaker. It’s ideal if you want to double down and add Alexa access in more rooms of your home, or add voice control to your smart home gadgets.

Honorable Mention

Amazon Echo Show Five ($90)

Amazon

This isn’t our favorite Echo device, but it does fill a particular niche. The Echo Show Five is the smaller, pared down version of its larger sibling the full-size Echo Show. While it is significantly cheaper, it’s also a lot smaller which makes it a good choice if you’re just looking for an Alexa-enabled alarm clock. It’s not useful as its larger cousin, though. Think of it as bedside-table-Alexa more than a dining-room-table-Alexa.

Other Alexa Speakers Worth Considering

Echo speakers are great, but the best way to use Alexa isn’t with an Amazon device at all. Below are three speakers that we like more than the Echo Plus, Spot, Dot, Tap, or Show. Find more recommendations here.

Sonos One ($200)

Sonos

The Sonos One is the WIRED Gear team’s favorite smart speaker and multi-room speaker (we gave the first generation 8/10 and our WIRED Recommends seal of approval). If you’re going to buy one (or two) speakers for your home, the One is a smart bet thanks to its Wi-Fi networking that lets you string any Sonos speakers together, and robust support for nearly every music and audio app you can imagine. It also features Google Assistant, if you want to betray Alexa for its biggest rival (and you just might).

Sonos Beam ($400)

Sonos

The Sonos Beam is one of our favorite soundbars. It will seamlessly work with any other Sonos speakers you have, and you can easily play music on it when you aren’t binging Netflix. It sounds amazing no matter what audio is coming out of it.

Polk Command Bar ($299)

Polk

The Polk Command Bar isn’t flawless, but it’s a great value for the price. It’s hard to get a regular soundbar and subwoofer for this price, let alone one that basically has an Echo Dot plopped in the center. It’s one of the better soundbars you can own.

UE Megablast ($160)

Ultimate Ears

The UE Megablast (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is one of the best-sounding portable smart speakers we’ve tested with one of the longest-lasting batteries. Did we mention that its waterproof, just like UE’s smaller Blast speaker, which is fantastic as well. Be sure to buy the optional charging stand or you’ll have to tip them on their side to charge. It’s getting a little long in the tooth though, so some of the newer options might have a bit more longevity.

Harman Kardon Allure ($200) for Bass:

Harman Kardon

If you’re all about that bass, consider the Allure (it earned a 7/10 in our review, a respectable score). It has a huge downward-firing subwoofer that will shake up any party and has Bluetooth support if you get tired of barking orders at it. Don’t buy it if it costs more than $200, though. Its price bounces up and down regularly, so wait a few weeks and try again.

What’s WIRED and TIRED About All Echo Speakers?

Here is the good and bad of Amazon’s own Alexa speakers, summed up.

WIRED: Amazon’s own Echo speakers with are the easiest Alexa speakers to set up. You just download the Alexa app and you’re good to go. They also have some exclusive features, like screens, audio/video calling, and Zigbee smart home support, which other Alexa speakers don’t have. Amazon’s dedication to low prices also makes them quite affordable.

TIRED: Some Echo speakers don’t sound great, and in our experience Alexa is not as useful as Google’s Assistant. The Echo Show is the only Amazon-made speaker we recommend in our list of the Best Smart Speakers.

Is Now a Good Time to Buy?

Yes. The Echo Show Five was recently unveiled and even if your Echo is replaced, it will likely retain its functionality for many years.

We advise against buying a refurbished 1st-generation Echo speaker. Buy one of the 2nd or 3rd Generation Echo or Echo Dots to get a significantly better experience. The mild savings won’t justify having an older model that may not get supported as long.

More WIRED Buying Guides

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The Best Amazon Fire Tablet
Our Favorite Affordable Smartphones Under $500

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Hexbyte Tech News Wired

Greetings, gamers! Welcome to a new edition of Replay, WIRED’s lightning-fast videogame news roundup. Undoubtedly the biggest deal this week was the announcement of Nintendo’s new Switch Lite, but that’s just the beginning. There’s also a new Lord of the Rings MMO on the horizon, and Cuphead might be getting a TV show. Let’s press play.

Lord of the Rings Is Getting Another Chance at MMO Glory, This Time From Amazon

Lord of the Rings has a big, complicated history in videogames. Famously, it had a major foray into the massively multiplayer world with The Lord of the Rings Online, a game that launched in 2007 and remains a cult favorite to this day for its expansive, detailed approach to living inside Middle-earth.

That game wasn’t exactly a success, though, and now a new one is coming to snatch the glory it never attained. Amazon Game Studios is currently in the process of developing a massively multiplayer online game in collaboration with Leyou Technologies that will reportedly be free to play and available for PC and consoles. Amazon, you might remember, is currently developing a Lord of the Rings TV show, but according to reports, the two efforts won’t be connected. The title might fare a bit better than the game that came before it, though—the devs at Amazon have worked on MMOs ranging from EverQuest to World of Warcraft. It’s in good hands.

Some Changes Are Coming to the Nintendo Switch—and We Don’t Just Mean Switch Lite

This week, we got the major (though not unexpected) announcement of a new, lightweight Nintendo Switch model coming this fall. The model includes permanently attached JoyCons and a smaller screen, but no television dock, making it a cozy little portable baby in the budding Nintendo Switch family.

It’s not the only change coming to the Switch, however. The Verge reports that Nintendo has made filings with the FCC to change the internal components of the base model console, specifically the system-on-chip, the NAND memory type, and the CPU board. Changing out these central components doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the system’s performance or capabilities will change in any way. It may just be a move to less expensive components, or away from in-built design problems in the original hardware. Either way, it means that soon the Switch could be just a little different from the original, which is probably a good thing.

Cuphead Is Getting a Netflix TV Show

Netflix is turning Cuphead, a videogame about old cartoons, into a new cartoon. Reasonable. The Cuphead Show, currently in production, will channel the game’s homages to 1930s Fleischer-era animation to, presumably, tell wacky violent stories about a sentient cup and his struggles with the world around him. It’s a tricky thing to do, though; as writer Yussef Cole has laid out elegantly, Fleischer-era art often drew from imagery and tropes found in earlier minstrel shows, and Netflix will have to work hard to avoid falling into the trap of repeating the same mistakes of that earlier era without understanding the context of what it’s doing. We’ll see when the show launches if it’s managed to thread that needle.

Recommendation of the Week: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, by Monolith Productions on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4

Let’s keep going with the Tolkien theme and recommend one of the strangest, most videogame-y Middle-earth adaptations ever made. Edgy, violent, and absolutely non-canon, this brilliantly crafted third-person action game sets you as a supernatural invader taking on Sauron before the events of the Lord of the Rings, trying to get revenge and overthrow the Dark Lord before he can cause any bigger problems. The game is known for its Nemesis System, wherein an in-game mechanic crafts custom orcs for you to fight, with ongoing storylines improvised by the game’s algorithms between you and your orc foes. It was innovative and fascinating, and we’ve not seen anything quite like it since.

Community leaders say AWS increasingly poses an existential threat

Hexbyte News Computers On March 11, a Vice President at Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing behemoth, published a blog post announcing the release of its own version of Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source software search engine tool.

Elastic is a public company founded in 2012 that is currently worth over $5 billion; the vast majority of its revenue is generated by selling subscription access to Elastic’s search capabilities via the cloud. It’s based in Amsterdam and employs more than 1,200 people.

In the blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), explained that the company felt forced to take action because Elastic was “changing the rules” on how its software code could be shared. Those changes, made in the run-up to Elastic’s 2018 IPO, started mixing intellectual property into Elastic’s overall line of software products.

Open-source software is defined as code that can be freely shared and modified by anyone. But now Elastic was telling customers that certain elements in its product mix could not be accessed without payment and that the code could not be freely shared.

Elastic did not explain its strategic shift at the time. But industry observers interpreted the changes as a response to increasing competition from AWS, which had incorporated Elasticsearch’s code and search functionality into its own suite of computing services.

Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company currently looking over its shoulder at AWS. In 2018 alone, at least eight firms have made similar “rule changes” designed to ward off what they see as unfair competition from a company intent on cannibalizing their services.

In his blog post, Cockcroft argued that by making part of its product suite proprietary, Elastic was betraying the core principles of the open source community. “Customers must be able to trust that open source projects stay open,” Cockcroft wrote. “When important open source projects that AWS and our customers depend on begin restricting access, changing licensing terms, or intermingling open source and proprietary software, we will invest to sustain the open source project and community.”

AWS’s announcement did not attract the immediate attention of the Democratic presidential candidates or the growing cadre of antitrust activists who have recently set their sights on Amazon. But in the world of open source and free software, where picayune changes in arcane language can spark the internet equivalent of the Hundred Years War, the release of AWS’s Open Distro for Elasticsearch launched a heated debate.

Open source software has been one of the biggest success stories of the software industry. In 2018 alone, Microsoft’s purchase of the open source software development platform GitHub for $7.5 billion, Salesforce’s purchase of the open source company Mulesoft for $6.5 billion, and IBM’s blockbuster $34 billion purchase of the Linux vendor Red Hat proved that open source is a crucial part of the larger software industry. And there is growing acceptance that the collaborative model of developing open source software is a winning strategy to meet the tech industry’s need for constant innovation. So, when the likes of Amazon start accusing companies of not playing fair, people notice.

AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

Sharone Zitzman, a respected commentator on open source software and the head of developer relations at AppsFlyer, an app development company, called Amazon’s move a “hostile takeover” of Elastic’s business. Steven O’Grady, co-founder of the software industry analyst firm RedMonk, cited it as an example of the “existential threat” that open source companies like Elastic believe a handful of cloud computing giants could pose. Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic, carefully defended Elastic’s new licensing practices, while at the same time making his unhappiness with Amazon crystal clear.

Elastic’s products, Banon wrote, have been “redistributed and rebundled so many times I lost count… There was always a ‘reason’, at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence. None of these have lasted. [Amazon and other vendors] were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community.”

(AWS declined to comment on the record for this story, and open source companies on the front lines of the confrontation refused to speak in detail about their relationship with Amazon, either providing generic statements or declining interviews.)

The reaction to Amazon’s move wasn’t all negative. Some veterans of the open source community praised Amazon’s defense of open source values, while pointing out the fundamentally messy contradictions of Elastic mixing commercial priorities with open source principles. And fundamentally, adopting open source code is entirely legal.

But the notion that Amazon was presenting itself as an altruistic defender of the digital public commons rankled community veterans like Zitzman, who says that Amazon has a poor reputation for working with the community. (GitHub data shows that Amazon has far fewer employees than Microsoft, Google, or IBM contributing code to open source projects.)

These critics see Amazon’s decision to recreate Elasticsearch as opportunistic . behavior. Amazon, they say, is leveraging its dominant power in cloud computing in order to unfairly reap intellectual property. In doing so, AWS is striking at the Achilles’ heel of open source: lifting the work of others, and renting access to it.

What happened to Elastic, Zitzman says, fits into a “long-standing trend of AWS rolling out managed services of popular open source technology, or replicating such technologies… This move is a text-book commoditization move — providing Elastic’s premium services for free.” Or as Salil Deshpande, a managing director at Bain Capital Ventures and an investor in multiple open source companies, puts it: “It is clear that AWS is using its market power to be anti-competitive.”

On the campaign trail, Senator Elizabeth Warren recently called for the breakup of Amazon, declaring that “you can be an umpire, or you can own a team, but you can’t do both at the same time.” She was referring to Amazon’s role as both an e-commerce platform and a vendor — a scheme that lets the company observe market trends and undercut sellers with in-house products at opportune moments. But Warren’s words might also describe Amazon’s behavior in the open source economy.

If Amazon uses the same ostensibly anticompetitive tactics in the cloud that have helped it establish a commanding position in e-commerce, regulators might want to start paying closer attention. A single company enjoying a dominant position in the cloud could, some critics suggest, result in less overall innovation in the most important part of our digital infrastructure. And that means that the future of antitrust may be up in the cloud.

“What’s happening to open source providers illustrates the raw power that Amazon has,” says Stacy Mitchell, a longtime critic of Amazon and co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit organization that specializes in challenging “concentrated economic and political power.”

“Amazon’s control of the core infrastructure for exchanging goods and data means they have the ability to set the rules for how everyone else operates,” Mitchell says. “We should recognize that as a kind of governing power.”

Hexbyte News Computers AWS is the undisputed goliath of cloud computing, controlling somewhere around 32% of the total worldwide market, or as much as the next three biggest providers combined. When a configuration error knocked large swathes of AWS offline for four hours in February 2017, much of the internet stumbled: Slack, Venmo, BuzzFeed, and even Apple’s iCloud all experienced difficulties.

The list of prominent companies that rely on AWS includes Spotify, Netflix, Airbnb, Comcast, Lyft, Uber, Adobe, and NASA. Big chunks of the U.S. government depend on AWS. Medium, the publisher of this story, uses AWS too. Each of these organizations is taking advantage of the same irresistible value proposition: Off-loading computing operations to the cloud saves money and frees companies to focus their attention elsewhere.

In fact, it might be more revealing to list the companies that don’t use AWS: Walmart, Target, Gap, and Kroger — vendors that are all acutely familiar with Amazon’s cutthroat retail tactics. All of them eschew AWS, Sharone Zitzman says, precisely because “they can’t trust [Amazon] with their intellectual property and business insights.” Walmart goes so far as to require that any technology firms they partner with also eschew using AWS.

Last November, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for global retail and consumer goods told CNBC that retailers “want to own their own data, and they want a partner that is not going to be a competitor of theirs in any other part of their businesses.”

The revenue numbers generated by AWS are eye-popping. In the fourth quarter of 2018, AWS accounted for $7.4 billion — or 10% — of Amazon’s revenue, with that number growing a rate of 45% per year. That same quarter, AWS represented 58% of Amazon’s “operating income” — a key measure of profit. By comparison, in 2018, Amazon’s fourth-quarter product sales revenue grew at an annual rate of 8.2%. AWS is increasingly the engine that makes Amazon go.

But “the backbone of the internet” is far more than just a bunch of massive data centers where companies store their information. AWS is both infrastructure and services, meaning that in addition to its low prices, AWS offers a constantly expanding palette of computing essentials, including data processing, analytics, search, security, and integration with multiple programming languages.

The surging growth of cloud services over the past decade has led to a proliferation of companies that sell tools and services that can be integrated easily with AWS, Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering, or Google Cloud. That includes Elastic, but also database firms MongoDB and Redis and the real-time data management company Confluent — all open source software companies operating under a cloud subscription business model referred to in the software industry as SaaS, or “software as a service.”

“Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat.”

One of the most striking developments in the evolution of the software industry over the past 20 years has been the emergence of open source companies like Elastic and MongoDB, which have monetized their investment in freely shareable code while harnessing the labor of a large community of programmers. The SaaS subscription model is key to this success story. Customers eagerly outsource the constant labor of updating their software, while open source companies are committed to continually innovating and improving their product. What seemed revolutionary and vaguely anti-capitalist in the late 1990s is now a well-established and thriving business model.

But critics say AWS is endangering that balance by effectively strip-mining the popular open source tools created by others and integrating them into its own cloud product suite. Though some existing licenses mean that that type of behavior is legal, it also makes it much more difficult for companies like Elastic to convince customers to continue paying.

In addition, critics argue that the company’s role as a platform gives it an unfair advantage. Because AWS has thousands of customers, the company has a godlike perspective of broad industry trends, including insight into which third-party tools are most popular. The suspicion, one executive of an open source cloud tool company told me off the record, is that AWS is watching “run rates” — the amount of money spent on a particular tool per year. When they see a service provider like Elastic start to generate serious revenue, Amazon incorporates the functionality of that tool into its own proprietary service. In the words of Warren, that makes AWS both a team owner and an umpire.

Developers like Elastic are starting to take note. “In the last twelve to eighteen months, in fact, a switch has been flipped,” wrote RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady in a recent post. “Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so overpowering, in fact, that commercial open source vendors have chosen — against counsel, in many cases — to walk down strategic paths that violate open source cultural norms, trigger massive and sustained negative PR and jeopardize relationships with developers, partners and customers.”

Critics like O’Grady argue that Elastic’s recent changes were spurred by a concern of being overshadowed by AWS. Far from defending the principles of open source, critics feel AWS is building its own business by incorporating whatever data management tools turn out to be popular and useful into its own service offering. O’Grady says Elastic isn’t the only open source cloud tool company to shift toward more restrictive licensing agreements over the past year. MongoDB, Redis Labs, and Confluent, among others, have all done the same.

The license changes have caused massive controversy in the open source world, where anything that smacks of proprietary control tends to be treated as apostasy. None of the companies would directly comment on why they made the changes, but there is a common theme that links them all together: An explicit attempt to prevent cloud computing providers, with a special focus on AWS, from taking code that someone else created and delivering it as a service on a cloud platform. The license changes thread a very narrow needle: They aim to maintain the perception that the underlying code is still free to share and modify by the greater community, while preventing specific cloud platforms from taking the functionality represented by that code and offering it as a subscription service.

In other words, open source advocates argue, there’s no problem at all if AWS engineers want to contribute code improvements to their tools, but there absolutely is a problem if AWS wants to start selling its own version of those tools.

Hexbyte News Computers Late last summer, Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions. For Redis, AWS had become an existential threat. GeekWire’s Tom Krazit wrote last November that “as more and more companies embrace cloud computing and ‘lift and shift’ their existing applications and infrastructure to providers like AWS, it makes a lot of sense [for customers] to use the AWS Redis service… [rather than] a service offered by Redis through the AWS Marketplace.”

The key difference? When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money. “This is a problem not just for us but for almost any successful open source project to date,” Ofer Bengal, CEO of Redis, told GeekWire.

Two months later, MongoDB, another extremely successful open source database company, announced its own licensing change. CEO Dev Ittycheria explained that “[w]henever a new open-source project becomes popular, cloud providers strip mine the technology, put the freeware on their platform, capture most if not all of the value but give little back to the community.” (AWS followed up by releasing its own “managed services” version of MongoDB, called DocumentDB, in January 2019.)

Then, in November, at the company’s annual Reinvent conference, AWS announced a service called Managed Streaming for Kafka, which duplicated the functionality of an open source tool originally built by the event-streaming platform developer Confluent. Two weeks later, Confluent announced its own license changes. CEO Jay Kreps explained the move in a blog post:

The world has significantly changed with the rise of cloud offerings that provide this kind of software as a service. In this new world, the cloud providers have significant advantages: they control the pricing of all resources a service provider will use and can tightly integrate their own services across all their offerings.

The major cloud providers… all differ in how they approach open source. Some of these companies partner with the open source companies that offer hosted versions of their system as a service. Others take the open source code, bake it into the cloud offering and put all their own investments into differentiated proprietary offerings.

Kreps declined an interview request, but it was clear who he was referring to. Though retweets are not always endorsements, when Elastic CEO Shay Banon tweeted a link to his post defending Elastic’s license changes, Kreps promptly retweeted it. The battle lines seem to be drawn. On one side, the commercial open source cloud tool providers who feel the ground shifting underneath them, and on the other, an earthquake named AWS.

The most recent confirmation of the split between AWS and the open source world came at the Google Cloud Next conference in mid-April. Google announced a series of partnerships with open source companies—notably, many of the firms that changed their licensing terms in 2018, including MongoDB, Redis, Confluent, and Elastic. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told TechCrunch, “Any platform that wins in the end is always about fostering rather than shutting down an ecosystem… In order to sustain the company behind the open-source technology, they need a monetization vehicle. If the cloud provider attacks them and takes that away, then they are not viable and it deteriorates the open-source community.”

Hexbyte News Computers Last December, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University, predicted that, in 2019, Amazon would spin off AWS into its own company, in part, reported BusinessInsider, to “placate regulators who are starting to scrutinize [Amazon’s] anticompetitive practices.”

Some critics of Amazon supported the idea, on the simple theory that cutting off the company’s retail operation from its cloud computing money tree would force Amazon to stop unfairly subsidizing its e-commerce operations and undercutting the competition.

But while splitting off AWS from Amazon might weaken Amazon as an overall entity, it would do nothing to address the fact that AWS itself may be big enough to trigger its own antitrust action. And it seems as if AWS has already begun acting like a monopoly power when it comes to the open source community.

Observers of the clash between AWS and open source worry that the room for further innovation may be rapidly shrinking.

Salil Deshpande, the Bain Capital Ventures managing director, says that Amazon has three behaviors toward open source that are offensive and aggressive: “They take open source code produced by others, run it as a commercial service, and give nothing back to the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source, thereby intercepting the monetization of the open source; they fork projects and forcibly wrestle control away from the commercial entity that produces and maintains the open source projects, as they did in the case of Elasticsearch; and they hijack open source APIs and place them on top of their own proprietary solutions, thereby siphoning off customers from the open source project to their own proprietary solution.”

AWS’s 30% share of cloud computing, as well as its astronomic growth, should be cause for national concern. Antitrust focus on retail is well-founded: Retail is a huge part of the current U.S. economy. But the infrastructure of online computing is just as obviously a huge part of the future of the nation’s economy.

Hal Singer, an antitrust economist at George Washington University, says one of the primary problems with Amazon’s economic dominance is that if one company overwhelmingly controls a market, there is less and less room for what he calls “edge innovation” — new products and services created through the competitive pressures. And even though a strong case can be made that right now the world of open source software is thriving, observers of the clash between AWS and open source worry that the room for further innovation may be rapidly shrinking.

Elastic’s current stock price, as of April 23, was over $10 higher than on the day of its IPO, which suggests the company is doing reasonably well in the short term. But the disconcerting scenario is that AWS’s introduction of Open Distro for Elasticsearch might gut Elastic’s ability to continue generating revenue from its own version of its search tool in the long term. And that, in turn, will inevitably repress its capability for making future innovations — or, in the worst-case scenario, result in Elastic’s ultimate demise. The e-commerce world, after all, is all too familiar with the destructive force Amazon can wreak on almost any market it enters.

“This has the potential to have very destructive fallout for the open source world,” Zitzman says. “When a corporate giant like AWS doesn’t play fair, they are actually shooting themselves in the foot, as they will eventually find themselves without open technologies to roll out.”

Hexbyte Tech News Wired

Last year, Seattle’s city council repealed a tax on big employers less than a month after approving the legislation designed to raise funds to support homeless programs. The quick reversal came after Amazon, which employs around 45,000 people in the city, halted the construction of a new building and threatened to not occupy space it had leased in the planned Rainier Square tower because of the tax. Now Amazon says it won’t move into the Rainier Square tower after all.

“We are always evaluating our space requirements and intend to sublease Rainier Square based on current plans,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “We have more than 9,000 open roles in Seattle and will continue to evaluate future growth.”

The company leased 722,000 square feet, enough for between 3,500 and 5,000 people, according to The Seattle Times, in the still-under-construction Rainier Square tower in fall 2017.

The announcement follows Amazon’s decision not to open an additional headquarters in New York City following backlash over the $3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives the company was expected to receive from state and local governments. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has appealed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to reconsider, The New York Times reported Thursday.

In Seattle, members of the city council last year initially proposed a “head tax” of approximately $500 per employee on companies with annual revenue in the city of $20 million or more. Amazon would have had to pay around $22.5 million per year for its 45,000 employees. The tax would have changed to a 0.7 percent payroll tax in 2021. After Amazon halted construction on its new building and threatened to sublease the Rainier Square space, the city council passed a compromise that cut the head tax in half and ditched the payroll tax idea entirely. The city expected the revised tax to raise $47 million a year for services for the homeless and construction of affordable housing.

After the compromise, Amazon announced it would resume construction of the new building, but didn’t commit to occupying Rainier Square. At the time, an Amazon spokesperson said the company was “disappointed” by the council’s decision and was “very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses.”

Less than a month later, facing a ballot initiative to overturn the tax, the city council voted to repeal it.

Tensions between Amazon and Seattle were already growing before the head tax. When Amazon announced its plans to open a second headquarters outside of Seattle, then Seattle Chamber of Commerce chair-elect Heather Redman said it should be a wake-up call for the city to change its attitude toward the company.

But Amazon’s critics see the company’s decision not to occupy Rainier Square as proof that there’s no point in acquiescing to its demands. “Last year @Amazon threatened to scale down growth to bully Seattle from taxing big biz to fund social housing,” city council member Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, tweeted. “Now they’re carrying out the threats despite Dem politicians (shamefully) repealing Amazon Tax. Clearly, caving to corporate threats doesn’t work.”

Tag Archives: Amazon

Hexbyte Tech News Wired Best Amazon Echo and Alexa Speakers: Which Models Are Best?

The Best Overall Echo

The Best Echo Smart Display

The Best Echo for Voice Only

Honorable Mention

Other Alexa Speakers Worth Considering

What’s WIRED and TIRED About All Echo Speakers?

Is Now a Good Time to Buy?

More WIRED Buying Guides

Hexbyte Tech News Wired Amazon Is Making a ‘Lord of the Rings’ MMO Game

Lord of the Rings Is Getting Another Chance at MMO Glory, This Time From Amazon

Some Changes Are Coming to the Nintendo Switch—and We Don’t Just Mean Switch Lite

Cuphead Is Getting a Netflix TV Show

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