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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."
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!"
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.
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.
Netflix is doing the same thing that HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Amazon Prime is doing. They all started off just licensing works from others. How do they stand out now that there's a lot of competition? By creating their own content that is only available from them. I'd say that a majority of the people that use Netflix do it to watch the non-unique programming, but when you know you can watch House of Cards or Alpha House it's an incentive to get the service.
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.