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."
Re: Cable Cutting
The Amazon FireTV (the full size square, not the HDMI dongle) is a fantastic device for $99 and XBMC has native support for it now. Once you bump the buffer from 20MB to 500MB and remove the bandwidth cap XBMC + Amazon Fire TV is a fantastic device for streaming the largest uncompressed 1080p video. It also handles your standard 100MB-4GB video files without cache modification as well. Also it does stuff like Netflix, Amazon Prime (aka HBO), most Android apps (like BombSquad, a Smash Brothers clone), you can side-load APKs without rooting it etc etc Amazon did a great job with the device and I use it daily instead of owning a cable box.
Absolutely zero interest in an Amazon branded phone though. I heard their Fire Tablet or whatever was pretty fantastic for the time but the market has moved on and even the $79 chinese branded tablets are competitive these days for most users.
moox. for a new generation.
Amazon devices sales are terrible because they don't have Google Play app marketplace. End of story. Everyone who wants to get locked in to a content ecosystem where they are forced to buy devices from one source already owns Apple products. Amazon devices are a media appliance, not computing devices. They have a shitty app store. That isn't going to change any time soon. An Amazon Tablet or Phone is only useful as a portal in to Amazon Prime and Kindle content. It's 1 dimensional. Why would anyone want to own one when they can buy a Nexus phone and tablet and get Google Play AND Amazon Kindle AND Amazon Prime AND Barnes & Noble?
I love Amazon, do 100% of my purchasing of physical goods via Prime. I get 25% of my print media through Amazon because their DRM makes it difficult for me to transfer their content in to my preferred ereader app: Google Play Books. I have a digital bookshelf in one place and I don't want to have to search through 3x different apps to remember where I purchased my ebook.