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Life With the Dash Button: Good Design For Amazon, Bad For Everyone Else
vivaoporto writes: A scathing review published on Fast Company describes Amazon's Dash Button, the "Buy Now" button brought into the physical world as "the latest symptom of Amazon's slowly spreading disease", "an unabashed attempt to disconnect customers from the amount of money we're spending." The author's criticism centers on Amazon's lack of focus on customer experience, a core UI that doesn't make sense, limited and expensive product selection and a store UX "no longer designed for your convenient shopping", but rather "designed for their profitable selling."
I can tell you didn't RTFA.
The whole point is pushing the button provides no immediate feedback at all. People are used to pushing a button doing something immediately, not pushing a button and *MAYBE* something happens 48 hours from now.
As such, these buttons are unlikely to gain any kind of popularity.
Yeah, I don't really believe there's anything genuine there...
Where else can you get a complete Wifi and processor board for hacking ready to go for $5.00?
I just hope they dont realize that the 4 I bought will never be pushed to buy their products. I already have one triggering events on my Linux server, and soon to have the rest acting as remotes for home automation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't think many people actually fail to grasp the basic tenets of 18th-century economics, it's just that it's so obviously a massive oversimplification that maybe people don't quite believe that it's generally true in practice. You do say "voluntary" exchange, but it's not clear how "voluntary" many real-world purchases are. An example is vendor lock-in, where an exchange that was optional in the beginning is structured through technological and legal barriers such that re-purchases are not viably optional. Such a vendor is then free to raise prices as he sees fit, and he is no longer selling "the product" he is selling an antidote to the pain of discontinuing use of the product, the price of which might be way more than "the product" is actually worth per se. Overall wealth is not thereby increased, instead the vendor is siphoning money from the host (sorry, customer) without providing greater value in return. (A capitalist would argue that "value" inheres in saving money on not restructuring around a different product, but that's just bullshit.)
Even in the sphere of everyday life, it's not at all clear how far purchases for food, lodging, medicine and so on are truly "voluntary" exchanges.
So the theory as you stated may be quite correct, and yet not apply at all to real-world economics outside of very carefully demarcated areas such as the purchase of luxury products.