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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
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.
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.
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
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.