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Why Does Amazon Want To Sell Its Own Smartphone, Anyway
curtwoodward (2147628) writes "Amazon is well-established as an e-commerce and cloud computing pioneer. So why do its ambitions include a bigger push into consumer electronics, including a long-rumored leap into the very competitive smartphone market? In a word, control — of data, consumer profiles, and royalties on purchases."
It'll be easier for their drones to find me if I have an Amazon phone.
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite not too long ago and while I am happy with the technology and have become a voracious reader for the first time in years, the platform obviously is ultimately meant to allow Amazon to sell you e-books to read on it, sell advertising to third parties, and gather data on what you are reading and how both for itself and for third parties.
However, while they can probably depend on a majority of their customers to be sheep, they make it surprisingly easy to avoid all that. The Kindle is jailbreakable, so if you get the slightly cheaper version that shows advertising, you can disable that. You are not dependent on Amazon, but can put content from anywhere on it (such as pirate ebook sites). Keeping the Kindle in Airplane mode all the time means it can't communicate over wifi on how you are using the device, and you don't lose anything really if you are getting your ebooks from places other than Amazon, because the built-in web browser is crap for anything anyway.
So perhaps Amazon is growing into an all-consuming monster of Big Data and advertising, but I hope they continue to make it easy for us nerds to opt out.
Didn't people ask the same thing when Apple, a computer company, started selling portable music players? And then again when they started selling phones?
Amazon understands piracy. Is so damned easy to order books on my Kindle I don't even bother to download them even though it'd save me $8. It's just not worth me getting out of my reading chair and dinking around with it. I can search for the book, click a button, viola. The prices aren't crazy and I can get my books when I want them. If the music and movie industries did something similar I'd probobly start paying them again as well. But when they still think they can manipulate how, when, and where I watch their content... force me to watch inane previews, bribe my TV manufacturer to limit its features... all just to extort the maximum profit out of me, it's just easier to pirate it.
Have you seen Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
Except that you have no control over whether that book will remain on your Kindle. You just have to have faith that your books won't be revoked for $SomeRandomReason.
Famous example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07...
More recent example: http://digitaljournal.com/arti...
Amazon is a giant now, but so was RadioShack back in its prime time. RadioShack is struggling now, because they did not adapt their retail stores to new consumer needs. Adaptation is necessary. What is a business' number one resource? People. This is important, because Amazon is huge and the majority of the population are well aware it exists. How does a well known company get more clients? By predicting their specific needs. Smartphones collect data that can be used to predict these things. Google has this figured out, and make money by referring customers, and not by selling any products. Amazon already has invested in mobile technology via its Kindle series, so a logical step would be to expand to cell phone technology so they can start their data mining.
I suspect Amazon sees the smartphone as a portable checkout terminal. Rather than leave it open to any competitors, they want to own the OS and get a peek at what you're looking for. It's also a consumption device, and is the hook to selling movies, books, etc. It may be the case that they really don't want to be in the smartphone business, but fear what a competitor might do.
Place nail here >+
A stillborn, hopefully...
While the poster above you presumably does not have control since he gets books from Amazon delivered directly to the Kindle over its 3G or wifi connection, Kindle owners do have control over their content if, as I said, they just keep in the device in airplane mode all the time. When you buy an ebook from Amazon -- or simply get it from a pirate site as is just as easy -- it's a normal, ineffectively DRMed file and you can move it to a plugged-in Kindle in USB mass storage mode. With the wifi connection off, Amazon has no way of knowing what is on your device or "revoking" it.
I used to worry about that, but, for books, I realized I just don't care. Only novels are acceptable for me to read on a Kindle. Technical materials must be in paper form or PDF. Once I've finished reading a novel, with very few exceptions, I'll never read it again. If I do, I'll find a hard copy. Life is too short for obsessive hoarding.
In a previous /. topic, it was stated that shareholders want growth above everything, and that a firm with a market niche that was profitable was considered far less attractive than one that was operating at a net loss, but was expanding into new markets and buying out other companies [1].
Amazon is playing the market quite smartly. Shareholders want growth, Amazon is giving them what they want. I wouldn't be surprised to see an Amazon MP3 player (although that market is a tired one), if it kept the shareholders thinking the company was "growth-focused".
[1]: Maybe it is a good thing long-term. Buy companies like IBM or GE that are established and have stocks paying dividends, and hold those until this "growth" fad dies off and the stocks of functioning companies becomes mainstream again.