201–210 of 545 posts
First the rabbit hole of going to war with UPS to launch various harebrained schemes for delivery. Now picking stupid fights and annoying customers over something with marginal impact to the business.
Amazon is easily replaceable, Netflix, Google and Apple, not so much.
My guess is that the corporate numbers aren't doing good as they've started ratcheting prices up, and this is a smokescreen.
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Totally agree. They are destroying their most valuable component of their brand, for a relatively weak one (Prime Video). I have Prime and prefer Netflix, because Prime Video still doesn't have a great selection.
> They are destroying their most valuable component of their brand, for a relatively weak one (Prime Video). This is why it almost seems like Amazon's Google+ moment: one underperforming product area somehow manages to convince leadership to change the company's underlying principles in its advantage to the long-term detriment of overall brand perception. Edit: 32 points in 19 mins for this comment. I really hope som…
Go there right now and type macbook pro in the search. You'll get a page of results with these top results:
Apple MacBook Pro MF839LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop with Retina Display (128 GB) NEWEST VERSION
Apple MacBook Pro MD101LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop
Apple MacBook Pro MJLQ2LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display (NEWEST VERSION)
Apple MacBook Pro MB990LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop
Apple MacBook Pro MJLT2LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display (NEWEST VERSION)
The whole thing is a mess.
But yeah, I bought prime 4 years ago and amazon became my one stop shop for everything. This is their threat to google's business of taxing ecommerce via owning discovery. Amazon wins if search starts there and skips google; excluding items from prime dilutes that value.
But let's be honest: this is obviously amazon leveraging their ecommerce power to force apple to build amazon prime video into apple tv.
This is ridiculous. Google should delist Amazon.com to "avoid customer confusion" when searchers land there and can't buy a chromecast ;) Their explanation is just insulting.
> Their explanation is just insulting. Do they really need to explain their actions here to anyone? They don't owe Apple and Google a spot in their inventory.
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I believe they required sideloading because of Google Play's restrictions on selling items / subscriptions without giving Google a cut.
Google does not restrict the ability to sell items through your app; that's Apple. You can implement a store in your app with purchases if you want, without using Google's payment system. And many such apps exist in the Play store. What you can't do in an app in the Play store is implement your own app store and load arbitrary apps. And Amazon forces you to install the full Amazon app including its app store, rather…
I don't think this move is in Amazon's best interests long term. Their competitive edge with Prime is that I go to them first because I assume they'll have what I want, at a fair price and the highest level of convenience. If they are no longer the "Everything Store" then they won't be where I go to for everything...
Totally agree. They are destroying their most valuable component of their brand, for a relatively weak one (Prime Video). I have Prime and prefer Netflix, because Prime Video still doesn't have a great selection.
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"Google and Apple now both have open SDK's for creating streaming apps for their devices." And with what provisos about selling through those apps? This is not a technical issue. Amazon just doesn't want to give up 30% of GMS (which would be an even higher % of its margins) on digital media.
> And with what provisos about selling through those apps Chromecast doesn't have any special connection to Google Play. Anyone can cast whatever they want. Amazon Prime Instant Video can already be cast, but the user experience is so bad that you probably don't want to.
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If a device comes with a useable app store, I'd rather it not come with tons of bloatware for every service ever out of the box. At this point it just seems Amazon is touting their weight.
This move is obviously them using their position in the marketplace but I would imagine they would avoid the App Store as Apple takes a significant chunk of every purchase.