Live data from Hacker News

Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

aftvnews.com

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#41

Amazon should stick to what they are good at and stop releasing these also-ran products.

The way I see it is Amazon literally is an "I also-ran faster 2 years later" company.

Almost every product they have is a wildly successful variation on a mildly successful already existing product.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#42
post #32

Wish we would get out of this red ocean of competing messaging platforms and head towards something more open, like XMPP (at least Slack works dandy with that) or even how email and the internet in general works. I have five messaging applications on my phone already and there is nothing critical on these platforms that couldn’t be handled by a single, polyglot client.

That's what Matrix tried to solve.

Yeah, it went exactly as everyone expected.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#44
I think viewing this a just another instant messaging walled garden is short sighted. This appears to be the digital portion of Amazon's attempt to displace and disrupt the US mail system. Messaging/voice/video provide a secure digital communications backbone to every Amazon account, much like iMessage does for Apple IDs.

As Amazon operationalizes its own physical delivery network (planes, trucks, drones), the USPS is going to be demolished and postal rates will rise dramatically. Amazon accounts link every user one or more physical addresses. Anytime will also link those users to a secure digital "address" appropriate for delivery of sensitive information like financial and medical records.

With this hub in place, Amazon can act as a clearinghouse to functionally displace the physical mail system in the US and throughout the world. Most of what arrives in your mailbox would be more efficiently and securely delivered electronically, but to date there has been no centralized platform to digitally mail items so every bank/medical practice/company has had to create its own internal secure messaging system or rely on email.

Amazon Anywhere can act as the pre-scaled missing link to solve his problem while creating additional benefits to Amazon by functionally requiring anyone without an Amazon account to get one to receive secure communications in the future. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed as an IM or video call platform in order to fulfill this role.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#45

Amazon should stick to what they are good at and stop releasing these also-ran products.

I don't follow.

AWS, fire TV stick, echo dot, Amazon fresh, audible; all of these are great products / product lines that have little to do with delivery of non perishable goods.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#46
post #36
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimately curious, but what about them is objectively "lousy"? ANECDOTE ALERT: I love how easy it is to buy a book from them, my new James Baldwin novel went from "read a review on another site, found it on amazon, ordered" in about 3 minutes, and the book itself arrived a day and a half later.

Carmack has a good recent example so I will defer to him for an example - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/886229891720630272 I would expect a store of Amazons scale to do a far better job of categorising and searching information than what they offer right now. Also discovery of new books is very suboptimal in my opinion.

What results do you get for that search? The first and most are actually about video codecs for me. Then you have the weird erotic fiction, but restricting the search to "video engineering" is 2 clicks away on my phone, 1 on desktop.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#47
post #7

why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?

If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried sever…

Exactly this. WeChat is an example of what Amazon can possibly do that no other US company is remotely capable of.

I was going to say I can imagine an app that combines FB Messenger, Yelp, Travelocity, OpenTable, GrubHub, and Uber. But WeChat already has all these things (either via companies they own or via partnerships).

Amazon also has Prime, so they can offer millions of subscribers incentives to prime the AnyTime pump.

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because messaging is a fundamental aspect of humanity, and because WhatsApp, Messenger and Slack now have platforms that almost anything and everything can be built on, producing ungodly amounts of money.

Is there any publicly available proof that WhatsApp, Messenger, or Slack are producing godly amounts of money? Because as far as I can tell: * WhatsApp only produced large amounts of money for the founders but never profited and was intentionally never priced for massive profits. * Messenger's monitization efforts have only been experimental so far, and those experiments have been lackluster from a revenue standpoint…

Butterfield has talked about Slack's revenue already being in the billions

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#49
post #7

why in the world is everyone so keen on entering the messaging app space? what the hell is the value for all of these companies? is conversation data that useful for training deep nets or something?

If you take a look at what wechat has done in china,you will get the answer.More and more people there are shopping,making payments via wechat pay instead of alipay,watching news through wechat news instead of other news sites,searching keywords through wechat search instead of baidu and doing almost everything in wechat.WeChat is a growing threat to other IT companies in china.In fact,alibaba has already tried sever…

Can Facebook and other US tech companies move in WeChat's direction successfully, in the West? Why did WeChat take off as such an everything-application in China? Do the same necessary motivations and trends exist elsewhere?

I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally - or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari.

Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps. Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?

Re: Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime

#50
post #28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Enterprise space is quite competetive in messaging space. Microsoft is the clear winner so far, followed closely by Google.

Why is MS trying their hardest to kill Skype, then?

They are? Haven't they been pushing Skype for Business pretty hard, considering also that they have supplanted Communicator/Lync with it as well?
Post reply on HN