Amazon's Echo Chamber

22 Nov 2014 • dcurt.is

Dustin Curtis:

But as Amazon has released more and more pieces of junk over the past couple of years, I’ve lost faith. The Fire Phone, for example, is not just bad; it’s so terrible that it’s dishonest of Amazon to sell it to anyone. There are zero people on Earth who would be better off owning a Fire Phone instead of an Android phone. I’m not exaggerating–go find one to play with, and you’ll understand. The hardware is abysmal and the software is embarrassing. You would have to be delusional as a manager to launch it and tell people that it is a well-made phone. What does that say about Amazon’s consumer-side brand and strategy?

It’s extremely hard for me to understand Amazon’s consumer hardware strategy. Usually, when a company has a strategy I don’t understand, I can look deeper, ask employees, or analyze the greater market to get a faint idea of what is driving the company’s behavior. But with Amazon, I can’t. There is simply no rational explanation for its products. The only thing I can come up with is this: Amazon continues to make hardware because it doesn’t know that it sucks, and it has a fundamentally flawed understanding of media.

Worth a read in it’s entirety.