To offer an alternative perspective: I'm gay and live in a minor city in the UK. It's very unlikely I meet other gay men through my hobbies, it's just improbable unless you live in a major city. So the dating apps are very useful and I've met great people through it. I'm sure it's the same for other niche groups or straight people who live in rural areas, and there just aren't many single folk around.
Even if they have internal counsel (I haven't checked but I'm sure a company as large as Booking.com does), for decisions which have for reputational harm, it's useful to lean on advice from X prestigious third party.
The same goes for using consultants. It's not just about deferring blame for a backlash but lending an air of objectivity and professionalism to the decision(s) made by management.
I remember London public transportation used to be shit and expensive. Disregarding his later downfall, Ken Levingstone did a tremendous job during his tenure as mayor, with Oyster card, introducing the congestion (which subsidises TfL) and convincing the train companies to jump in the scheme as well.
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons public transportation outside london is so poor in comparison is that councils outside London are not allowed to subsidise it the same way London is. They are also forced to use private operators.
I'm in the UK and have never met someone called Alexa. Is it really a common name? Perhaps it is in the US, but it's not like Amazon chose a popular human name e.g. Sarah, Ben, etc.
Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
Alexa is easy to recognize by software with very low error rate unlike Sarah or Ben.
> Of all things I am suspicious of why they would choose a female name for an assistant.
For the same reason airport announcements are usually voiced by women. For the same reason satnav is voiced by women. For the same reason language learning tapes are voiced by women. People (both men and women) are more comfortable listening to women.
I suspect you suspect it is because of assistant being women stereotype, not it's not that, and no need to look for social injustice everywhere.
If they had picked a male name they would have received complaints that it is sending a message that if you need help you should ask a man.
They are going to lose on that front no matter which way they go, so likely the best approach is to pick which works best technically. I'd expect that would be a female voice due to less low frequency components, making it easier to get it to sound good on a small speaker.
But there are significant sums invested to fund research. In many ways it's a similar transaction to the VC. An investment into 'bad' research does not help the university or funding council reach their goals e.g. to raise their own funding or contribute impactful research to science. Hopefully, they are diversified enough for the bad eggs not to matter
I tried to replace WhatsApp with Signal, by telling all my frequent WhatsApp contacts I'm moving to signal and they should download it if they want to talk to me.
About 10% of contacts moved to Signal. I lost touch with the rest and Signal was in many ways worse than WhatsApp for everyday communication.
I ended up using WhatsApp again. For me, it's too popular to leave.
