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I didn't even know it existed. But, even if I did, why would I use it? Most products have a few hundred reviews that are already present, that I can use to deci
by jordan801 9y ago
I didn't even know it existed. But, even if I did, why would I use it? Most products have a few hundred reviews that are already present, that I can use to decide if it's a good product or not. It definitely doesn't help it's cause, that it's only available for Prime users. Oh, it comes with some user uploaded images? Prepare to filter through a barrage of unprofessional images, that are too dark to even make out the product.
It almost feels like this product was conceived by someone's kid, and they allowed it's release to give him/her a participation trophy. Then abruptly afterward swept it under the rug, afraid someone might behold the abomination.
It:
-Has no market use.
-Has terrible application.
-Has no marketing, other than this article.
- portofcall 9y agoYou’re the fourth person on a tech site, out of five who commented, who didn’t even know it existed. That’s pretty telling.
- dfxm12 9y agoYou’re the fourth person on a tech site ... It's not really a tech tool though, and probably isn't marketed to tech people. It's a 6 month old Pinterest-but-for-shopping type of mash up. It's not really out of line for the developer crowd to not know it (or to have read the press release back in July and promptly forget it). Plus I think there was an article on here a week or two ago about how hard it is to compete with Pinterest...
- toss1 9y agoAdd another Prime member who didn't know it existed! Not only that but I can't even find it going to look for it. amazon Prime page ^F "spark" returns nothing, Search on Amazon returns energy drinks and other items by that name, the android app doesn't seem to have it either. It might actually be useful if it has good search & discoverability for products, but if no one even knows about it...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 9y agoI read one theory that products like Amazon Spark or Facebook Mail exist to ward off antitrust regulators' attention by giving the appearance of more competition between tech giants without having a serious expectation of success. I'm not sure if that's true but it's interesting to consider.
- patentatt 9y agoWell that is diabolical, and a very plausible theory. It does explain some of the more oddball products put out by large dominate companies.
- brokensegue 9y agoplausible? hardly.
- emodendroket 9y agoWhat makes you say that?
- cerved 9y agoProbably because it assumes it's more likely that this is the result of an ingenious, diabolical plan as opposed to incompetence.
- stagbeetle 9y agoThe greatest trick the devil ever played, was to convince everyone he was stupid. The second part of Hanlon's Razor, was to not rule out malice.
- chris_wot 9y agoI must be missing the irony somewhere, but I wasn't aware of a second part to Hanlon's Razor.
- bitumen 9y agoThe headline could just as easily be, “Nobody has heard of it.” How does Amazon fail to market something so completely? Internal politics?
- toyg 9y ago> It almost feels like this product was conceived by someone's kid Could it be the output of some Amazon version of Google's "20% time"?
- camtarn 9y agoAmazon doesn't have any official 20% time policy, although occasionally developers do have side projects on their own time. As I mentioned above, though, they do spin up small teams to quickly knock out some half-assed idea some VP had. It may well even have been the VP's kid's idea, passed to leadership via the VP.
- reaperducer 9y agoThink about how demoralizing it must be to work on that project. Especially if you're a new person and all full of hopes and ambition. You end up stuck on a dead-end project that was designed to fail, and it doesn't matter how hard you work, it is bound for the roundfile.
- camtarn 9y agoBeen there, done that - twice. Amazon has a tendency to spin up internal startup-like groups to try out a bunch of fairly random ideas and see which ones stick. As an example, I worked in one team whose brief was literally just "We want another IMDB to sell ads on, but for a different vertical. You pick." - we created a user-generated music encyclopedia because it seemed like a good idea at the time. It sank without trace after three-four years of almost-zero usage - although we did have a few fanatical users who submitted literally hundreds of thousands of edits. It was ... odd. It really is demoralizing to work on a team which is started to pursue a dubious idea with no market. You have to go in each day and ignore the nagging doubts that tell you that in two years, the team will dissolve and you'll be onto a different project. The only thing that keeps you going is that the tech is usually interesting and fun to work with, and occasionally a team can pivot onto a different idea. The aforementioned team spun off a separate team focused on getting artists to pay to customize their Amazon pages, a bit like IMDb Pro. A different team building a (doomed) external tool inspired a colleague to start a micro-team and build what became a well-loved internal content creation tool. On the other hand - while the environment isn't great for doing startup-like teams (twitchy lawyers, bureaucracy, lack of external interest because you're just another Amazon product instead of a shiny new startup), when the product fails you ultimately still have a job.