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Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

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Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#4
I think ultimately google home and amazon echo will walk a separate path. Amazon will focus on what they do best--selling stuff, and Google will focus on what they do best--providing information.

Of course they will be a big overlap (like how it is now), but smart companies tend to play to their strengths than to play by their enemy's rules.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#5
post #2

Considering the ambiguity of "Sold Out", maybe the original headline, "Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush", would be better?

I think the salient point is "Amazon sold more Echos than they expected to sell." Holiday rush can be anticipated (and was the impetus of AWS).

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#6
post #2

Considering the ambiguity of "Sold Out", maybe the original headline, "Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush", would be better?

I think the salient point is "Amazon sold more Echos than they expected to sell." Holiday rush can be anticipated (and was the impetus of AWS).

Agreed here.

If there's anyone who knows how to stock up for the holidays, it's Amazon. It's kind of amazing that they sold out on the Echo, all things considered.

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#7
Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well.

There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are?

I am currently typing this from a 2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router. Last week, iOS decided to randomly delete all of my saved locations in the Maps app. I've never had stable, fast internet anywhere I've lived in the US in the past 8 years - every few days or so, shit just doesn't work for a bit. I've owned things like a Nest or Philips Hue in the past, and they randomly reset to factory mode or desync'd from my phone . Half the time I try to play my PS4, some stupid patch fails to download, or PSN is down, etc.

The more things like the Amazon Echo I would have in my house, the more irritating my daily life would be - because I don't want to deal with the 5% of the time where I have to repeat my request 5 times for it to tell me the weather, or the connection to the Amazon server is lost and I can't play any music. This 5% of the time across dozens of devices results in being annoyed 100% of the time.

All of this is why I mainly use a record player to listen to music at home (no DRM, no problem with servers being down or albums removed remotely), really like my GameCube for video games (put a disk in and play, no patches to download), still exclusively buy paper books, am fine with dumb light switches, and so on.

If you think this entire thing is ridiculous, I fully agree - I make my living contributing to this industry! But either people are living through these same annoyances as I am and they're fine with it (in which case please teach me your secrets), or somehow I'm getting a worse experience with technology than 99.9% of the population (I guess statistically such a person must exist, and it is me).

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the salient point is "Amazon sold more Echos than they expected to sell." Holiday rush can be anticipated (and was the impetus of AWS).

Agreed here. If there's anyone who knows how to stock up for the holidays, it's Amazon. It's kind of amazing that they sold out on the Echo, all things considered.

Alternatively: could selling out be a method of potential advertisement?

"If they sold out, the product must be great!"

Re: Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush

#9

I think ultimately google home and amazon echo will walk a separate path. Amazon will focus on what they do best--selling stuff, and Google will focus on what they do best--providing information. Of course they will be a big overlap (like how it is now), but smart companies tend to play to their strengths than to play by their enemy's rules.

Well what Google does best is advertising to the right customer.
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