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Amazon's Echo Chamber
An anonymous reader writes: The announcement this Thursday of another dubious piece of hardware from Amazon led Dustin Curtis to write an article critical of Amazon's hardware strategy, saying the company just doesn't understand what makes a device good or bad. Curtis says, "With Amazon.com, it can heavily and successfully promote and sell its products, giving it false indicators of success. It's an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing back.
The media strategy that seems to be driving Jeff Bezos to make mobile consumption devices (with Amazon's media stores and Prime video/music) is flawed. No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore. That market is quickly and brutally dying. The media market is now so efficient that all profit is completely sucked out of the equation by the time you get to the consumption delivery system, to the point that it is barely possible to break even."
The media strategy that seems to be driving Jeff Bezos to make mobile consumption devices (with Amazon's media stores and Prime video/music) is flawed. No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore. That market is quickly and brutally dying. The media market is now so efficient that all profit is completely sucked out of the equation by the time you get to the consumption delivery system, to the point that it is barely possible to break even."
I thought this article would be about the sound chamber inside of the Amazon Echo, now I'm disapointed ... http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo
Netflix made 71m off of the 'there's no money to be made slinging content' game, and who knows how much Apple makes off music, either in content distribution or hardware. Yes, they made a product less desirable for their market and they're paying for that mistake, oh well.
Bye!
Who is Dustin Curtis, and which multibillion dollar company did he found?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Right, so this one blogger has it all figured out and Amazon is doomed for failure. Amazon makes money, that's what they do and well.
Amazon (under Bezos' leadership) has made enormous amounts of money where no one thought there would be money. This will be the sleeper hit that dominates the next generation of IoT.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Badoom tish!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
The article completely misses the point. Amazon failed to get their magic wand into the kitchen, and they're exploring different entry points into our daily life. They don't care what it looks like, how nice it sounds, how otherwise useful it may be as long they have something on your kitchen counter ready to respond to the next time you say "Oh hey, I'm out of coffee...".
These little (some are pretty big & expensive) devices have been selling like hotcakes. I think Amazon was trying to get in on this market.
Dustin Curtis does not understand Amazon's strategy and therefore the strategy must be wrong
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
What makes it false? If they sell the product and make a profit, that's a basic success. Who cares if customers put the product in a drawer and don't use it? That's where many products end up -- that doesn't make them unsuccessful.
Voice control is there on phones and some car dash controls, but always as a secondary interface. Making a product dedicated to voice is a chance for both users and developers to stop relying on screen as a crutch and make the new interface really work for them. Eventually this can bring sales to Amazon if users find it more convenient to just say "Alexa, order me some toilet paper" rather than getting a phone out of the pocket".
Product sold, money made. Done!
iPod, iPhone, iDong, iThinkThisMightBeWrong, etc
You're allowed to put out a few failures if it takes you to success.
Apple 3? -> LISA? -> Macintosh!
Apple Newton? -> Ipod(the old crappy ones)? -> iPod! -> iPhone!
Econet? -> X25? -> Packet Ring? -> The internet!
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
... if they sell it, then it's not "false". They actually sold it. They don't care if you use it or put it in a drawer.
Honestly I think it's a great strategy to be bold and NOT be afraid to try new things. They are lucky to be in a position to be able to reach many of their customers and experiment. I say try, be bold. You fail, you hopefully learn from your mistakes and customers. Try again. Something will stick and could become successful.
At least Amazon compared to Samsung tries new things they do not copy. It takes courage to try and gamble with large sum of money. My hat off to Amazon even if I don't always like their product. Hell I did sign up for the Echo. I might stay in a drawer after a few weeks who knows but it's a good opportunity to try something very new. A virtual assistant that could listen to you at all time in the future. There is a lot of potential to learn from this.
But they make up for it in volume.
A live, 24/7 microphone in a black box connected to the Internet.. Yeah.. what could possible go wrong with this idea? Proof that the American public really doesn't care of privacy issues.
The Kindle was a runaway bona fide success as a cheap tablet that peaked at the height of the tablet craze, and the Kindle Fire was a successful followup. Amazon provided Android tablets to the masses. The Fire Phone was a flop, and I can't even figure out what this Pringles-can thing is, but Amazon Prime is a way to monetize OTHER PEOPLE's content (e-books, etc) where Amazon gets a steady revenue stream from yearly subscriptions while content creators get a percent of a pittance for their work. That's successful as long as there's more supply than demand for e-books, a situation I don't see changing as long as people write stuff essentially for free and take Amazon's Vader-like bad deal to get a pittance for it. Amazon has also leveraged their existing logistics chain to sell other people's stuff, and again they get paid for doing almost nothing. They also leveraged their own cloud infrastructure they already had to sell server instances to other people. So far, Amazon is winning more than they're losing with their products. The only problem they seem to have is pushing margins so low that no one can make any money with them around, so sellers are basically avoiding them unless they are already selling commodity goods (or desperate for sales). Their biggest threat is that they have walled themselves up inside their own walled garden, and there are too many options that do the same thing that people don't see the value in locking themselves into the Amazon ecosystem for digital content. Amazon will either have to open up, or be like Apple and be content with a ceiling to how many paying customers they can acquire with their locked-down ecosystem.
Why does it matter ? If the opinion was from a New York Times journalist, nobody would have cared about the author, and the message would have been discussed following everyone belief on the NY Times. Here, it's a nobody giving an opinion, and he is judged as a nobody, rather than being judged on the content.
This is all intellectual laziness. You are judging the content following the fame (and political orientation) or the author/support publishing it. You have lost all critical sense. If something get published by an author/support you have affinity with, you're gonna like it, if you don't have affinity with the support, you're gonna dislike it.
I have family who ended up working in *large* billions dollars tech company after having been bought. Their comment goes pretty much on the same way as the blog post. The company itself is so big, and has a so large customer base that every piece of shit software they will produce will generate sales and millions dollars in revenue... but it doesn't change the fact it's P.O.S. software nobody will likely ever use.
Amazon advertises HD movie rentals and purchases, and then waits for customers to actually buy or rent the movies before revealing that they can't be played without buying one of a few devices. They claim that the Hollywood studios impose this, but it's awfully convenient that one of the few devices named is Amazon's Kindle.
So, they advertise a product, accept payment for the product in good faith, and then refuse to deliver the product. Customers have to contact support for a refund.
This product will become analogous to the Kindle in this way, but for music and audio books. Since audio recorded from the environment has to send data to Amazon's cloud for the features to work, this also allows Amazon to data farm directly from conversations in our homes. That's just creepy.
the company just doesn't understand what makes a device good or bad.
OK, I definitely don't understand the thinking behind the Fire phone, but the Kindle Touch is an absolutely fantastic device. And popular enough to dominate its market as well.
So what the hell is this guy talking about?
So a year or two my friends and I were sitting in the living room and us geeks of course see something playing on my XBMC Media Center and we need to a reference to it from some movie we're watching. I go, why can't I just talk to my media center box to read me the synopsis of it from WikiPedia or Google or something so we know what the movie is talking about. My friends go we can do that with the Android phones and ask them but they are stupid so they will do the search for you but you have to read the long article.
Now there Amazon Echo device does exactly what we wanted to do is to have a Star Trek like experience of asking, "Computer, what is a Widget?" and we would get an answer. I just wish that Google made one or some other company so that we could have more generalized and generic access to many online sources of info instead of being locked into the Amazon Cloud of Fog.
Anyway, I requested a pre-order for it and we'll see if I qualify. I'd like to be able to just talk to my computer and get info back that it too cumbersome to search for.
To quote TFS: ...make a product ... market the product ... sell the product ... customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it ... move on to the next product...
after all, isn't that the basis for 99% of modern capitalism?
Ooh, shiny!
This clown is simply parroting what every Apple jihadist believes; that only Apple knows and understands the user.
Except of course what the Echo looks like is irrelevant, just like the visual appeal of a TOILET is irrelevant when you need to use one. The point of the Echo as Techcrunch correctly divined, is to SELL THINGS. INSTANTLY, without even a single click of the mouse. Because with an ubiquitous voiced recognition device FROM AMAZON..why wouldn't it be able to find and buy things when you tell it you want them??
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/06/lets-call-the-amazon-echo-what-it-is/
Think about it - always listening, always plugged into the grid where it could send the data back to the collectors on every street post in America.
Ever wonder why they strung telephone and power on the same pole? It's not for convenience - the two are horribly incompatible and terribly dangerous to mix. But both the FBI and the NSA needed a way to use power grid appliances to send data back to their servers, and once you hit a transformer it's hard to do that. By putting telephone on the poles, all the connections are right there together.
You're not paranoid; they've been listening in on your conversations continually for decades, even before the "internet." I, of course, have to put that in quotes because it was the internet as early as the 1940s, but it was a major leak that caused them to fabricate most of the documentation from DARPA to look like a new research project.
In fact, the moon landing wasn't actually as expensive as it was. They originally did plan to go to the moon, until the country-wide 24/7 surveillance plan (well, the network parts) were revealed. The moon landing had to be scrapped and faked because most of the money was siphoned off to re-do the entire way the surveillance was being run. We could have gone and come back if it weren't for the cover up, but we just couldn't hide that much money any other way.
How do I know? I was part of the project. I've got terminal cancer now, so it's not like I have anything to lose. All I can say is we busted our asses for near 5 years to reroute and deflect that we'd been doing 100% surveillance and monitoring since the early 40s. It was part of the WWII run up. It never ended. I don't even know all the ways they've tapped everyone now. I just know that most everybody at Ft. Meade has a huge laugh about the Google Now and Siri and now the Echo, because we don't even need that data - it's like our third tier backup. We don't even actively monitor that unless one of the others fails, and even then I don't think they've ever actually archived that stream.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Stasi secret police from the former East Germany would have loved the Amazon Echo. Brilliant idea to sell consumers a device which is always connected and always on, and sits in the living room indexing every word of conversation spoken within earshot.
Let's try the echo chamber.....
Y I P P P E E E ! ! ! YIPPEEEE!!!! YIippee! Yipppeee.. yipppeee..... yippp
Would you have a breakdown of where those 100K people are, what they do and (roughly) how much the get paid?
I'm curious because paying 30,000 people to do minimum-wage, seasonal work for 3 months before Christmas in their shipping center isn't the same as 30,000 programmers earning 6 figures each on annual contracts.
(Also - didn't Amazon try and claim that since they ship a lot of things they should get credit for keeping UPS/FedEx/etc drivers employed? I'd like to know if that's included in the 'indirect' employees or not (and if so, how many) ).
The Echo just comes across as a marketing gimmick for Christmas. It's the high-tech equivalent of buying someone a Snuggie or a Chia Pet.
No, I will not work for your startup
"they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it,"
So the product goes unused, doesn't seem false to me (ok, so I didn't RTFA like everyone else). It reminds me what my cousin said. Sales and marketing has been so successful is why we see good business in storage places and huge consumer debt. The S and M convinced millions to go into debt buying stuff they don't need.
However, some other kind of paradigm can come in and *poof* Amazon goes bust or becomes irrelevant.
mfwright@batnet.com
If you don't calm down we'll send you Roland Piquepaille...
This is just google voice search, right? Try asking the distance to the moon, then ask "what is that in miles/kilometers" (whichever it didn't give to start)
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I have noted over time that Amazon has many many flaws. Flaws that would potentially kill any company competing in only the given space of the flaw. But that by throwing the weight of the company behind it these flaws can be hidden. For instance I don't use AWS simply because I can't predict the costs. Also it is supremely complex. GoDaddy made a fortune by bringing easy domain registration and use to the masses. Then companies like linode have nailed virtual machines hosting for the masses. I am not saying that this makes AWS terrible but that why can't they match these other services and market to the masses?
Then I hear horror stories about strange outsourced shipping. Not all their shipping but that they end up dealing with horribly flawed shipping companies who have learned to game the Amazon system for a long time until finally Amazon un-slumbers and eliminates them. Then the horror stories from their warehouses, and the bizarre packaging stories. Their fights with publishers. And on and on.
What I think that Amazon has basically done is get big enough that they are able to pick many industries and say "The emperor has no clothes." and then make a fortune proving it. So the publishing industry has long played games with the printing and distribution of books; silly inefficient games that gave them supreme control. I predict that someday soon Amazon will turn its spotlight onto the textbook industry and voom it will be a twitching bloody mess overnight.
But my other prediction with Amazon is that now they have changed so many different businesses that new nimble companies will figure out what Amazon is doing wrong and do it right in this new world. So that when all is said and done that amazon will leak one area after another where they are dominating now; I suspect that with books they will probably wake up and finally realize that they should remain best at one thing; the original thing.
I just hope it can read back your writing to you.
It sounds tempting as an explanation for their famous flops, like the Fire phone -- they pushed it on the front site of their giant e-commerce / do-everything site (I bet Amazon is a lot of people's homepage or startup tab set), so how could it fail, even if it barely succeeded? But plenty of companies have flops (I assume most, but then, I'm thinking of some high-end companies for which I can't think of any universally panned *products,* price aside, like Rolex ... are there any terrible Rolex watches?), and Amazon's made some awesome ones, too. I did not expect to like it nearly as much as I do, but my e-ink Kindle is pretty amazing to me, for instance. (On the other hand, the color tablets seem fine for some people's use and mindset, but I find them very unappealing for being so far from stock Android, lacking Google Play, etc.)
I am so far more curious than cynical about the Echo; plenty of room to reject it, but I'm trying to let the cool possibilities balance it out until I at least see one in person. I don't think it's yet time to label it a flop. That time may be *close* (we'll see!), but it isn't *yet.* I think an audio search appliance is a neat idea. Will they make it more Kindle Fire (OK, useful, just not ideal, and stretchable https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...) or more Fire Phone (cool cameras, but .... otherwise, oy).
If the products suck, then all the ads in the world can't make them otherwise. If they're good, really good, or great, though, the ads won't hurt ;)
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5