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Amazon Underground

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81–90 of 139 posts

Re: Amazon Underground

#81

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #65
robmiller wrote: post #49

Downloading now and it is coming from Akamai. Surprised it isn't coming from AWS.

Having just left a career at Amazon that spanned nearly 5 years, I can say with experience that it is not so uncommon to find this happening. I worked at a subsidiary, and we had to bill Amazon Corporate for our own AWS use. Being a media-oriented company, this particular subsidiary is sometimes a bit of an expensive AWS customer. As a result, my former department, to this day, uses a Hightail (formerly, YouSendIt) d…

> I worked at a subsidiary, and we had to bill Amazon Corporate for our own AWS use.

Well, doesn't Amazon have a philosophy that ALL interaction between departments must be via services?

Re: Amazon Underground

#83

Post by jsprogrammer »

ohazi wrote: post #72
modeless wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally, someone figures out the real reason Amazon is doing this. Thank you for doing the job all the journalists reporting on the press release failed to do.

No, the real reason Amazon is doing this is that they want to get the Amazon App Store onto Google and carrier branded Android phones. It's a fight for survival and relevance against Google Play.

Is amazon really in a fight to the death with Google play? Can I buy cat food there?

Re: Amazon Underground

#84

Post by eclipxe »

justin_vanw wrote: post #70

I bought my daughters Kindle Fire's for Christmas. It doesn't have the Google Play store. 99.99% of the apps available, either free or even paid, are cookie cutter, mass produced, generic garbage. Almost all the free apps were complete junk. Besides that, the Kindle Fire is a fundamentally useless device for kids. The kid mode was so buggy as to be useless. Take more than a few minutes of video and the wifi won't wor…

Did you contact CS? Amazon's customer support is amazingly good and would take care of that for you ASAP.

Re: Amazon Underground

#85

Post by jsprogrammer »

austenallred wrote: post #73
mangeletti wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "free" means there is no consideration on the part of the party receiving what would be deemed as a gift. Looking at ads and having your data sold is not free by any means.

It doesn't mean that at all. Free (gratis), by definition, means you don't have to pay for anything. You don't spend dollars. Watching TV is free. Using Google and Facebook are free. You download free apps from the app store. And those all have ads. If you want to repurpose the word to mean "free with no ads" you can do that, but you can't expect others to hold to that definition.

At the very least, I have to pay for it with my time, which is unrecoverable. If I can skip or otherwise ignore an ad, that is one thing, but forced interstitials is even more nebulous than a banner ad.

It's not free if I have to spend time servicing your revenue stream, unless you reimburse me at my market rate for my time that you spent/wasted.

Re: Amazon Underground

#88

Post by austenallred »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #85
austenallred wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't mean that at all. Free (gratis), by definition, means you don't have to pay for anything. You don't spend dollars. Watching TV is free. Using Google and Facebook are free. You download free apps from the app store. And those all have ads. If you want to repurpose the word to mean "free with no ads" you can do that, but you can't expect others to hold to that definition.

At the very least, I have to pay for it with my time, which is unrecoverable. If I can skip or otherwise ignore an ad, that is one thing, but forced interstitials is even more nebulous than a banner ad. It's not free if I have to spend time servicing your revenue stream, unless you reimburse me at my market rate for my time that you spent/wasted.

That gets into a very hairy definition of "free." How much did Hacker News pay you for the time you spent commenting? Probably not market rate. Yet we'd still probably say that Hacker News is free.

Re: Amazon Underground

#89

Post by hosh »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #83
ohazi wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the real reason Amazon is doing this is that they want to get the Amazon App Store onto Google and carrier branded Android phones. It's a fight for survival and relevance against Google Play.

Is amazon really in a fight to the death with Google play? Can I buy cat food there?

It's less Google Play and more breaking the control Google has over the Android platform, despite Android being open-source and spread out across a number of manufacturers. Google Play is a critical piece of that control.

The ads look like a way to defray that cost.

I wonder what Samsung will try to do. Something similar or something from out of their own playbook?

Re: Amazon Underground

#90

Post by tdmule »

hosh wrote: post #89
jsprogrammer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is amazon really in a fight to the death with Google play? Can I buy cat food there?

It's less Google Play and more breaking the control Google has over the Android platform, despite Android being open-source and spread out across a number of manufacturers. Google Play is a critical piece of that control. The ads look like a way to defray that cost. I wonder what Samsung will try to do. Something similar or something from out of their own playbook?

Partner with Amazon? I know when I got a Galaxy S4 the OEM Android included the Amazon App and Google Play stores. While they may do something different in Korea, it seems like a reasonable move in markets where Amazon has traction.
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