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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
Who is Dustin Curtis, and which multibillion dollar company did he found?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
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.