Well, there's one form of long-term thinking like "let's build a device that lasts a long time," and another like "let's build a product line/customer base that

Well, there's one form of long-term thinking like "let's build a device that lasts a long time," and another like "let's build a product line/customer base that lasts a long time." Amazon's mostly interested, it seems, in just giving people more ways to interact with them, more ways to consume their content, more reasons to subscribe to Prime, more ways to get locked in as you say. Having a long view is not necessarily equal or even in the ballpark of being consumer-friendly. I'm not sure that focusing mostly on making Fires cheap as dirt really means there's not long-term thinking going on. A buy-it-for-life tablet, of all things, probably isn't a great investment from anybody's perspective.