Amazon's new gadgets are just another data-collection scheme

To use the title of Brad Stone's seminal book about the nation's largest online retailer, Amazon is so much "The Everything Store" that it can be a little hard to remember when it was just a bookstore. But Jeff Bezos' ambitions are actually the grandest in the land, and the dozen-plus Alexa devices the company announced today show the next step. Throughout tech history, incumbents have needed to beware of leapfroggers. Apple never needed to defend a dumb-phone business, so it could upend smartphones. T-Mobile had no landline thinking, so it could become the UnCarrier.