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Amazon’s Echo Chamber

dcurt.is

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Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#41

Post by sanderjd »

moeedm wrote: post #33

Spot on. A lot of people have recommended a Kindle to me but I've held off. I can't get past the massive Amazon logo on it and the awful page turn.

Weird. My kindle paperwhite doesn't have an Amazon logo on it at all, I don't see how the page turn could be characterized as "awful", and it happens to be the far and away the best digital thing I've ever read a book on.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#42

Post by adventured »

girvo wrote: post #39
IBM wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is talking about Amazon's share in those profits. It's clear that people who own the IP make a lot of money in media content.

Which is exactly why Netflix for example is moving into content production. Does amazon do the same?

Amazon moved down that path two years ago, and is continuing to look at ways to expand original content:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/amazon-joins-netfl...

And for example, Alpha House:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_House

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#43

Post by cwyers »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #38
cwyers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't really want to be anymore, which is why they're spending so much money on original programming.

Amazon is also at least nominally getting into entertainment production, though so far they're doing a pretty clumsy job of it.

Amazon does a clumsy job at a lot of things. It's incredible. Their shipping and logistics? Top notch. Their server operations, including AWS? Very good. Their website UI? Pants. Utterly pants. Using the Prime Instant website to watch video and using Netflix to watch video is like the difference between night and day. Netflix is well-organized, provides helpful recommendations, and has meaningful categories. Amazon, meanwhile, uses the exact same UI for buying books as it does for browsing streaming movies. And it uses that same UI for office supplies, groceries, clothes and caskets. (Okay, maybe not caskets.) And it's a mediocre UI for all of them.

EDIT: I checked, you can totally buy caskets on Amazon. Wow.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#44

Post by adventured »

yen223 wrote: post #26
hkarthik wrote: post #7

Scathing and harsh, but probably pretty accurate. > 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. This part resonated with me a lot. The media market was always…

Didn't Bezos once say something like "your margin is my opportunity"? There's a certain irony in Amazon not being able to compete in mobile because the market is too efficient.

They can't compete because they're producing mediocre products that add little value; products that consumers don't have a good enough reason to want. Creating their own Android equivalent store was an extraordinarily terrible idea.

The problem is not because the market is too efficient.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#46

Post by adventured »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #22
danhak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Netflix is not a delivery network?

Is Netflix making money yet or are they taking losses to grow?

Netflix was profitable for 2011, 2012, 2013.

They generated $231m in net income the last four quarters (while simultaneously dramatically expanding their expenditures on content acquisition and production).

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#47

Post by cwyers »

schwabacher wrote: post #8

Echo seems really smart to me - the reason Amazon is in hardware is because they are terrified of 'ok google, order me lighbulbs', or 'hey siri, i need a new pair of socks' becoming the way people shop for things online. Amazon made Echo for 'alexa, order me wheat thins', and all the question answering and music playing is just window dressing.

Almost everyone who would be in the market for this kind of a device already has something in their pocket with access to Google Now or Siri, though. Why use Echo when you have to be in a certain room?

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#48

Post by 13 »

schwabacher wrote: post #8

Echo seems really smart to me - the reason Amazon is in hardware is because they are terrified of 'ok google, order me lighbulbs', or 'hey siri, i need a new pair of socks' becoming the way people shop for things online. Amazon made Echo for 'alexa, order me wheat thins', and all the question answering and music playing is just window dressing.

Does that really function? If I order socks audibly, I have no idea what I'm going to get. It's a lot more efficient to look through a page of images than to describe all the intricacies of my sock preferences via text to speech.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#49

Post by Turing_Machine »

baddox wrote: post #17
boynamedsue wrote: post #12

"No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore." Is that really true? No one makes money selling music, apps, or books on iTunes? Netflix doesn't make money selling a media consumption service? HBO doesn't make money selling premium content? Those are all examples of media. And they're all capable of making money for their creators and distributors.

The next two sentences are > 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. I don't think he's claiming that copyright owners can't make money selling copyrighted material. It sounds like he's claiming that the delivery…

If that's actually what he means, it's a feature, not a bug.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#50

Post by pbreit »

There's some truth there but also some misses. Besides the phone, Amazon's hardware has been at least decent and in the case of Fire TV, the best. The Kindles and tablets are more than usable. Even if only a speaker with a handful of voice commands (the complete Siri-like experience is a stretch; but, for example, voice search on Fire TV is excellent), the Echo looks to be a reasonable product.
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