Slashdot Mirror
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
They are probably just denying the problem exists since they don't like the solution.
Ipod(the old crappy ones)?
Ah yes, we remember the crappy ones. No wireless. less space than a nomad. Lame.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I want one in the garage.
I also want to name it Jarvis.
"Jarvis, what is the closest english size to 13 mm"
"Jarvis, remind me to order part number 132-2343".
Just some guy who realized that his given name, Dustin Thewind, had been sort of jinxed by the band Kansas a couple decades back.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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?