I would look at Amazon Spark — the social shopping feed Amazon launched a few years back. It never really gained traction with customers, and social commerce is a crowded space with Instagram and Pinterest already owning that behavior. Amazon's core strength is intent-based shopping, not discovery-led engagement. The resources invested there could have been redeployed toward improving recommendations on the core shopping experience, which has a much clearer customer value proposition and a more direct path to conversion.
I would sunset Amazon Sidewalk. The honest case for it is real — mesh networking for low-bandwidth IoT is a genuine customer need, and the opt-in network effect is architecturally clever. But the data tells a different story: consumer awareness remains low, the privacy backlash at launch cost significant trust, and third-party developer adoption has been thin. The opportunity cost is significant — the same connectivity and edge-compute investment redirected toward Alexa's ambient intelligence roadmap would reach hundreds of millions of existing Echo customers rather than a small subset. I would wind down new Sidewalk partnerships, honor existing commitments through a two-year sunset window, and publish a clear customer communication. The freed engineering capacity goes to ambient sensing on devices customers already own.