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Amazon's Echo Chamber

Posted by Soulskill on from the let's-build-a-robot-that-will-help-people-buy-things dept.

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."

11 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Uh by ADRA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  2. Who is that? by paiute · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who is Dustin Curtis, and which multibillion dollar company did he found?

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    1. Re:Who is that? by Fnord666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who is Dustin Curtis, and which multibillion dollar company did he found?

      Exactly. The article is nothing more than a glorified facebook post by some unknown. WTF it is doing on Slashdot is anybody's guess. This is a new low.

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      'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
  3. TRANSLATION: by Lehk228 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Dustin Curtis does not understand Amazon's strategy and therefore the strategy must be wrong

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    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  4. Great Strategy by drasfr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Give credit to the first voice-only product by miknix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think this technology can be particularly useful in the kitchen. If you like to cook you certainly know how annoying it is to smear olive oil or butter all over your phone screen while you are trying to bake a cake following an internet recipe :D

  6. Why does it matter ? by x0ra · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why does it matter ? by paiute · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, we are asking what his background and experience are that he can offer useful criticism of Amazon. If I badmouth your code, aren't you going to want to know what my qualifications are for judging it?

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      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    2. Re:Why does it matter ? by x0ra · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No. I'm gonna think about your remarks, and eventually come with counter arguments about why I did things the way I did.

      I have been on the other side of the fence, ie. being looked at by uptight people who thought they were right because they were older than me, and they ended up wrong. As well, I have stopped contributing to many open-source projects because the old guard always wants to be right and discarded any input from people without the right email domain.

    3. Re:Why does it matter ? by jbmartin6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      OK fair enough, let me take a stab at it. TFA was a piece of junk. Much like a Facebook post, it is a series of assertions without any substance. The author claims "customers have been pushing back" and provides no details. He says the hardware and software are crappy and 'unfashionable', and again provides no details. For all I can tell he is the only one who thinks so. "No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore. That market is quickly and brutally dying." is another example. Again, no details. Now, if the author were someone with an established reputation or a track record, or had a lot of karma, we might accept it on that basis.

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  7. Re:Oh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    the echo chamber is right here on /. and everywhere else in the media. Amazon doesn't care about this product or our criticism, Amazon cares that it's the holiday shopping season coming up and they have people talking about Amazon. Last year it was drone-package-delivery-that-was-and-is-not-going-to-happen-anytime-soon, and this year it's this...

    It's called PR folks, it's extremely effective and over and over again, supposedly sophisticated tecnhnoratie fall for it and fall for it.

    Why let them control the conversation? Let's agree to talk about this in January, see if anybody is interested, especially Amazon.