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Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

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Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#81

Post by teej »

jmatt wrote: post #78
matthewslotkin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since when does Apple launch minimum viable products? that is the opposite of what Apple does.

Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time required: The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported…

There's a huge difference between an MVP and cutting features to reach perfection.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#82

Post by unfletch »

YooLi wrote: post #6
josh33 wrote: post #4

Is an iPhone app against the iOS T's&C's?

Lack of an iOS player is interesting. I don't see a technical reason why Amazon couldn't make one. Ditto with an iOS video player for Amazon Video-on-Demand. Not making either of those (plus the Amazon Appstore & Kindle) makes me think Amazon is working on an Android platform of their own. They have the capabilities for a pretty solid media-ecosystem (music, video, apps, books, etc).

It actually looks like they could make the web-based UI work in Mobile Safari without too much work. (Easy for me to say.) The UI renders perfectly already. As far as I can tell, playback is the only thing that doesn't work. (But if you "download" a track it'll open in the built-in quicktime player and start playing.)

Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash playback. I don't have Flash installed on my desktop and playback works great.

Seeing as Safari has had background audio support since before it was granted to third-party apps, the web UI would be a decent stopgap in lieu if a native iOS app.

Here's hoping it's just a bug!

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#83

Post by matthewslotkin »

jmatt wrote: post #78
matthewslotkin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since when does Apple launch minimum viable products? that is the opposite of what Apple does.

Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time required: The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported…

I mean I'd hardly consider the original iPhone a minimum viable product. Smart phones had been around for years, and what the iPhone did was redefine the smart phone. I guess in some weird sense you could say that it was a minimum viable product for the future of other products that were like it, but you could say that for any product. In general, I would definitely not typify Apple as a company that gets to the fight first, but rather one that changes the fight when it gets there. That was true of the iPhone in the smart phone market, true of the iPod in the mp3 market, true of the iPad in the tablet market, and will likely be true of whatever special sauce Apple is planning for mobileme in the virtual locker market. My point is that Apple is not a company that throws out a product into consumer space with the knowledge that it is incomplete and seeking tons of consumer feedback. They release extremely polished products to a market, often with what I would argue is an unparalleled mastery of minimalism in their features (in terms of leaving a lot out of their products and only keeping in what they deem absolutely necessary to most users), which could be confused for minimum viability if you didn't know better. I would suggest Google as a better example of a big company that often releases products with the intention of quickly updating them once they start getting feedback. Facebook might be another less convincing example.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#84

Post by is_computer_on »

Would be great if it wasn't illegal to actually upload your music collection on there. I doubt that when you bought your music you got the right to distribute it to a third party which means uploading it onto Amazon's servers would constitute copyright infringement. Songs bought from Amazon probably come with a license that allows you to upload it to Amazon Cloud Player now, but with the music you already own and Music you buy somewhere else you're out of luck.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#85

Post by jrockway »

wheels wrote: post #62

I think there are two really interesting things about this: • This is the first time Amazon has pulled together the two major branches of their business, retail and cloud infrastructure, into something (dare I say it?) synergetic. • Amazon is taking the first steps into the non-retail consumer web, where, if successful, they'll probably give a good scare to a handful of startups as they sweep across segments (and wit…

Not necessarily true, really. When you save your current location on a Kindle, that's handled by an app running on EC2. That's just an example: I am sure pretty much all of Amazon's products use the AWS infrastructure.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#87

Post by mey »

teej wrote: post #81
jmatt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time required: The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported…

There's a huge difference between an MVP and cutting features to reach perfection.

Another example is the 1st generation iPod. Did just enough to solidify market share, then started evolving. You don't see people ooh and ahhing over a wheel anymore now that we are firmly onto touch pads.

Edit: Another example is iTunes (why couldn't you buy things directly on your device) or their office productivity suite.

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#88

Post by heyitsnick »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #79
matthewslotkin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since when does Apple launch minimum viable products? that is the opposite of what Apple does.

Not really, they just have a higher bar for their minimal viability.

Isn't the point of 'minimal viability' a low bar?

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#89

Post by jasonkester »

This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services.

Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle.

There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon wasn't interested in implementing that stuff themselves. There's no debating that this will make Amazon a ton of money. It remains to be seen, however, how much it will cost them in developer loyalty and businesses that never get built because "If they did it to JungleDisk, they'll do it to us".

Re: Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player

#90

Post by jasonkester »

itsnotvalid wrote: post #10

As a non-US there is no way for me to use this. Just put aside that, is it actually any legal reason for using things like dropbox to upload music purchased and streamed for private uses? BTW that one album/20GB offers only last until the end of the year, and it only last for a year. After that, you would have the habit of using the service but be reverted to the free plan. However since all the new purchases on amaz…

Fortunately for us non-US folk, this Minimum Viable Product also has a Minimum Viable BarbarianWall that's easily circumvented.

In this case, the only step of the process that checks your foreign-ness is the first one, where you accept the license agreement. So if you have a US VPN, you can quickly bypass the wall and get signed up. Then it's open to use directly from there.

Or better still, since it's Amazon, you can fire up one of their handy EC2 Windows boxes in New Jersey, remote desktop in and IE your way to http://amazon.com/clouddrive. It's a few minutes of pain, followed by a nickel charged to your Amazon account, but it gets you in to try this thing.

Enjoy!

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