Amazon's Echo Chamber 112
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."
Oh... (Score:5, Funny)
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 [amazon.com]
Re: (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 c
Uh (Score:5, 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.
Re:Uh (Score:4, Informative)
Not when they first started.
Re: (Score:2)
Netflix made 71m off of the 'there's no money to be made slinging content' game
Netflix is a content producer, in addition to a content slinger.
Not when they first started.
What the article states is "No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore [..] 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" (my emphasis).
Netflix started a long time ago, and even their streaming offering began quite a number of years back now. Things have moved on a lot since then.
Not saying I necessarily agree with the article's claim myself, just pointing out that since it *is* clearly
Re:Uh (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Netflix doesn't sell media, it rents out access a la carte.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't Netflix's model the exact opposite of 'a la carte'? You pay the same monthly price whether you watch one show or a thousand. It's more an all-you-can-watch buffet.
Re: (Score:2)
true. tbh I don't know what a la carte means. just looked it up, thx. regardless, the point is, Netflix is not impacted by the phrase in the article, No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore". I think you agree.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah. I'm a cable cutter w/ Amazon Prime and I'm quite happy with the video content. I don't watch much TV, but when I do I enjoy the commercial free content, even if it is a bit older. If you never watched it, it's all new to you.
Commercials are like cigarettes. Every one you watch takes five minutes off the end of your life. Of course, just sitting and watching TV does that, too, I'm just saying.
http://beforeitsnews.com/alter... [beforeitsnews.com]
Gotta go for a walk now. :)
Re:Uh (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Uh (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon devices sales are terrible because they don't have Google Play app marketplace. End of story. Everyone who wants to get locked in to a content ecosystem where they are forced to buy devices from one source already owns Apple products. Amazon devices are a media appliance, not computing devices. They have a shitty app store. That isn't going to change any time soon. An Amazon Tablet or Phone is only useful as a portal in to Amazon Prime and Kindle content. It's 1 dimensional. Why would anyone want to own one when they can buy a Nexus phone and tablet and get Google Play AND Amazon Kindle AND Amazon Prime AND Barnes & Noble?
I love Amazon, do 100% of my purchasing of physical goods via Prime. I get 25% of my print media through Amazon because their DRM makes it difficult for me to transfer their content in to my preferred ereader app: Google Play Books. I have a digital bookshelf in one place and I don't want to have to search through 3x different apps to remember where I purchased my ebook.
Re: Uh (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ironic.. You're saying it's bad because it doesn't have the official marketplace for Android, yet you're talking about being locked into a distribution system?!!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm with you. I bought it for $99 and my daughter absolutely loves it, uses it all the time. I've used it more than enough to be worth the money, as has my wife though the split is like 90/5/5%
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
They are probably just denying the problem exists since they don't like the solution.
Re: (Score:1)
loool congrats on a slick reference to a different article.
Who is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
I am wondering the same:
http://www.quora.com/Who-is-Dustin-Curtis [quora.com]
Apparently he's a genius because he designed a blogging platform with no features and no user interface because that's some how fucking genius and makes your brain work better.
Re: (Score:3)
I was wondering the exact same thing! Why did this article hit the front page, slow news day?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why does it matter ? (Score:5, 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.
Re:Why does it matter ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why does it matter ? (Score:4, 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.
Re:Why does it matter ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
So when was a business considered a success that is still losing money after 20 years?
Even a local mom and pop corner store has made a larger profit than Amazon.
Re:Who is that? (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon has low profit *compared to its size and revenue*, but a mom and pop corner store with this kind of profit would be astounding.
Here's their past few years:
http://investing.businessweek.... [businessweek.com]
2010: 1.15 billion
2011: 631 million
2012: loss of 39 million. So admittedly, Mom & Pop would be in trouble if they started in 2012.
2013: 274 million.
I would love to have a mom and pop store that made approximately 2 billion dollars profit in the past four years.
Now, this year looks like it might be another loser year, but it's hard to tell because the xmas season tends to be disproportionately profitable. They do operate right on the knife's edge, playing the long game that we so often say that companies can't bring themselves to do. But the way you write that makes it sound like they have a lifetime and yearly net loss, and no, Amazon is overall much more profitable than a mom and pop corner store.
Measures like return on assets could be another story.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Right (Score:1)
Right, so this one blogger has it all figured out and Amazon is doomed for failure. Amazon makes money, that's what they do and well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Right (Score:1)
The only things that Amazon have ever said that they sell at a loss are tablets and devices. That's not as dumb as you think once you realize those devices are used for buying more stuff on amazon (Ebooks, tv shows, subscriptions, random crap)
On every other item that they sell from other manufacturers they are right in line with other distributors regarding price. So they are making just as much profit if not more due to the fact that the don't maintain brick and mortar storefronts.
I think you've been misle
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Right (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins [eugenewei.com]
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works [ben-evans.com]
For investors, understand that not getting dividends from profits is not the same thing as not getting ROI. When you own stock in Amazon, and Amazon builds more of itself, then you own stock in more Amazon, and so your stock becomes more valuable. Also, that increase in value of the stock is considered to be capital gains, whereas money that would come from dividends is considered to be income, which is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains. These words may serve to illustrate this better than mine:
http://www.stocksplithistory.com/amazon-com/ [stocksplithistory.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Your second link shows it earning money at a low but fairly consistent rate, completely defeating your assertion.
Your first link shows them losing money over one quarter and predicting more losses, which would make this year a big loss. Which is obviously not ideal, but hardly consistent when the four year trend prior was profitable:
http://investing.businessweek.... [businessweek.com]
They certainly can't afford to become consistent in losses of this year's scale, but you can hardly say that they lose money consistently (yet)
Re: (Score:2)
Chech back next year... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Chech back next year... (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon (under Bezos' leadership) has made enormous amounts of money where no one thought there would be money.
They've made enormous amounts of revenue. It has never made consistent profits.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Chech back next year... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Chech back next year... (Score:1)
Exactly, amazon is doing old school business right. They are always reinvesting their money internally instead of playing a shell game with profit numbers and stock prices.
100K people - breakdown? (Score:2)
Would you have a breakdown of where those 100K people are, what they do and (roughly) how much the get paid?
I'm curious because paying 30,000 people to do minimum-wage, seasonal work for 3 months before Christmas in their shipping center isn't the same as 30,000 programmers earning 6 figures each on annual contracts.
(Also - didn't Amazon try and claim that since they ship a lot of things they should get credit for keeping UPS/FedEx/etc drivers employed? I'd like to know if that's included in the 'indirect'
Re: (Score:2)
The Fire line of tablets, for example, provided much more compelling competition to the iPad than the MS Surface.
This, folks, is a textbook example of "damning with faint praise".
Heard it all before (Score:1)
TRANSLATION: (Score:4, Insightful)
False sense of success? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
If the people who bought iPhones put them in a drawer, then Apple wouldn't be the insanely profitable company it is right now.
If people don't use their Fire Phones, then other people don't discover them and don't buy them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Way to miss the point. I was talking about how success is more than just putting the product in the hands of the early adopters.
The iPhone is a success because people use it and love it, they sing its praises and influence others to buy it.
Amazon surely wants more and better success than simply getting a small number of people to play with the device and then to put it in a drawer. They want people to buy and consume media on it, which is their play after all. If people don't do that, then they won't consid
Re: (Score:2)
What makes it false? If they sell the product and make a profit, that's a basic success.
It would, but since they do NOT make a profit, that's not really even a "basic success" is it?
Give credit to the first voice-only product (Score:2)
Voice control is there on phones and some car dash controls, but always as a secondary interface. Making a product dedicated to voice is a chance for both users and developers to stop relying on screen as a crutch and make the new interface really work for them. Eventually this can bring sales to Amazon if users find it more convenient to just say "Alexa, order me some toilet paper" rather than getting a phone out of the pocket".
Re:Give credit to the first voice-only product (Score:5, 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
Re:Give credit to the first voice-only product (Score:4, Funny)
I want one in the garage.
I also want to name it Jarvis.
"Jarvis, what is the closest english size to 13 mm"
"Jarvis, remind me to order part number 132-2343".
Re: (Score:3)
Voice accessibility features are for blind/reduced sight users who generally use their phones quite heavily, like they rest of us. While there are certainly bugs, they mostly suck for you because you never let go of the screen and train yourself to use them. Cooking, driving, biking lazy and especially blind/handicapped users will embrace and benefit from devices designed from ground up for voice.
Failure Matters (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re: (Score:3)
Books -> Consumer Goods -> Smartphones -> Media -> Bankruptcy!
Re:Failure Matters (Score:5, Funny)
Ipod(the old crappy ones)?
Ah yes, we remember the crappy ones. No wireless. less space than a nomad. Lame.
Re: (Score:2)
Ipod(the old crappy ones)?
Ah yes, we remember the crappy ones. No wireless. less space than a nomad. Lame.
You call them crappy now, but they were insanely popular amongst non-/. folk when they came out.
Re: (Score:3)
Whooosh....
http://beta.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
The joke is that /. being the consummate taste makers that it is, got the iPod chances of success completely wrong....
Re: (Score:2)
This being /. I was rather expecting people to go all nerdgasm over the Econet -> X25 bit rather than the iPod snark.
Um ... (Score:3)
Re: Um ... (Score:1)
Jeff Bezos has said that they don't deserve to make money if you buy their product and put it in a drawer. "We only win when our customers win" as he puts it.
It's why they sell hardware at or below cost. The point is usage. To that end, I'm *sure* that they track usage and have metrics of success beyond units sold. They have an entire back end for all of their services, and you are automatically logged in on their devices when you buy them on amazon.com unless you check "as a gift" in your cart. These
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, they track usage. They know what page you're on.
Great Strategy (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.
Re: (Score:1)
The Clapper was built by the NSA (Score:4, Funny)
Think about it - always listening, always plugged into the grid where it could send the data back to the collectors on every street post in America.
Ever wonder why they strung telephone and power on the same pole? It's not for convenience - the two are horribly incompatible and terribly dangerous to mix. But both the FBI and the NSA needed a way to use power grid appliances to send data back to their servers, and once you hit a transformer it's hard to do that. By putting telephone on the poles, all the connections are right there together.
You're not paranoid; they've been listening in on your conversations continually for decades, even before the "internet." I, of course, have to put that in quotes because it was the internet as early as the 1940s, but it was a major leak that caused them to fabricate most of the documentation from DARPA to look like a new research project.
In fact, the moon landing wasn't actually as expensive as it was. They originally did plan to go to the moon, until the country-wide 24/7 surveillance plan (well, the network parts) were revealed. The moon landing had to be scrapped and faked because most of the money was siphoned off to re-do the entire way the surveillance was being run. We could have gone and come back if it weren't for the cover up, but we just couldn't hide that much money any other way.
How do I know? I was part of the project. I've got terminal cancer now, so it's not like I have anything to lose. All I can say is we busted our asses for near 5 years to reroute and deflect that we'd been doing 100% surveillance and monitoring since the early 40s. It was part of the WWII run up. It never ended. I don't even know all the ways they've tapped everyone now. I just know that most everybody at Ft. Meade has a huge laugh about the Google Now and Siri and now the Echo, because we don't even need that data - it's like our third tier backup. We don't even actively monitor that unless one of the others fails, and even then I don't think they've ever actually archived that stream.
What gave them a false sense of success? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 succ
Understandable (Score:3)
Let's not be suckers (Score:2)
So, they advertise a product, accept payment for the product in good faith, and then refuse to deliver the product. Customers have to contact support for a refund.
This product wi
Really? (Score:3)
the company just doesn't understand what makes a device good or bad.
OK, I definitely don't understand the thinking behind the Fire phone, but the Kindle Touch is an absolutely fantastic device. And popular enough to dominate its market [wikipedia.org] as well.
So what the hell is this guy talking about?
Amazon Echo - Living room idea finally realized. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
This is just google voice search, right? Try asking the distance to the moon, then ask "what is that in miles/kilometers" (whichever it didn't give to start)
I hope (Score:3)
Recipe for success (Score:1)
To quote TFS: ...make a product ... market the product ... sell the product ... customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it ... move on to the next product...
after all, isn't that the basis for 99% of modern capitalism?
Ooh, shiny!
It's a marketing gimmick for Christmas (Score:2)
their success is getting people to buy stuff (Score:2)
"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,"
So the product goes unused, doesn't seem false to me (ok, so I didn't RTFA like everyone else). It reminds me what my cousin said. Sales and marketing has been so successful is why we see good business in storage places and huge consumer debt. The S and M convinced millions to go into debt buying stuff they don't need.
However, some other kind of paradigm can com
Many many flaws (Score:2)
It's the products, not the channel ... (Score:1)
It sounds tempting as an explanation for their famous flops, like the Fire phone -- they pushed it on the front site of their giant e-commerce / do-everything site (I bet Amazon is a lot of people's homepage or startup tab set), so how could it fail, even if it barely succeeded? But plenty of companies have flops (I assume most, but then, I'm thinking of some high-end companies for which I can't think of any universally panned *products,* price aside, like Rolex ... are there any terrible Rolex watches?), a