7 ms·

Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

188 points by ssclafani 15y ago

Volpe 15y ago
I'm not sure highlighting Amazon's Kindle Fire's reliance on 'streaming' over 'local storage' is a clear "positive vs negative". You can't stream without a (reasonable) internet connection... Seems more of a trade-off than an improvement.
- johnthedebs 15y ago
  Seems more of a trade-off than an improvement. That's exactly the point. Instead of trying to compete directly with the iPad, Amazon is serving a different part of the market.
dgurney 15y ago
Thank you for linking to the single page version of that.
xianshou 15y ago
I wish the authors of adapted metaphors were forced to map their altered versions to the original. Example: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. The Four Horsemen of Technology include Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Which goes with which? I vote Amazon for Conquest (of the Internet), Google for Famine (of attention span, and possibly design sense), Facebook for War (over friends, likes and popularity), and Apple for Death (of freedom). N.B. The preceding intended for humor only. Any attempt to interpret seriously will meet with swift rebuttal.
- etha 15y ago
  Conquest? Isn't it Pestilence?
thesteamboat 15y ago
The quote that spoke to me in the article > When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia. I know many people don't mind living in walled garden, especially if it's very pretty, but it seems unhealthy to me. Has this stopped being a scary thing to people?
- patio11 15y ago
  It was never a scary thing for people. The entire walled-garden-curated-experience versus open-standards-loose-confederation-of-providers generates heated discussion only among a small, small sliver of geeks. For most of the population, this is an irrelevant technical detail like what flavor the CMOS on the device is. Users lack the insight and vocabulary to even identify which world a particular device or ecosystem belongs to. (So do geeks, because this is primarily a matter of tribal affiliation rather than technical reality, but that's another matter entirely.) The underlying philosophy of your device matters not a whit to a 14 year old girl. She wants to listen to the same music, read the same books, and watch the same movies that her friends do. These are her core requirements for your device. The rest is boring geekery.
  - ryanwaggoner 15y ago
    Off-topic: Patrick, you strike me as a geek's geek. And that's a compliment. So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? About 80% of the time, I can tell I'm reading one of your comments because of this penchant you have for telling geeks that the things they're arguing about don't matter to normal people or to businesses. How did you develop your understanding of non-geeks? Bonus question: what do you think about QR codes :)
    - ericflo 15y ago
      I'm not patio11, but I have noticed something interesting about QR codes. All of the interactions with my tech/geek/entrepreneur friends seem to intimate that they think QR codes are kind of a weird thing that will never catch on with normal people so they don't use it. However, I recently saw my mom get out her phone and take a picture of one. Then independently I saw two more of my non-technical friends do it. Interestingly enough, I think QR codes are one thing that, at least anecdotally, are in the process of "skipping" geeks and going straight into the mainstream.
dangero 15y ago
"Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times." That's pretty enlightening. This guy is brilliant because he constantly reminds himself of the fundamentals of business, and is keenly aware that he easily gets off track from those fundamentals. It seems as humans, we're very prone to forgetting the most basic of lessons, and unless we constantly refresh on them, we can easily get off track. It puts things in perspective like the whole Qwikster/Netflix debacle, or the recent talk of bloat at Google. At a very basic level, these issues are signs that the people in charge may have gotten so caught up in the day to day that the lost their "firm grasp of the obvious". Since in both cases the mistakes are "obvious" to people on the outside.
- cop359 15y ago
  The Qwikster/Netflix thing is not at all simple As far as I understand streaming and renting are two unrelated businesses. On the surface, there is no good reason they should be tied to each other. It one of the very basics of organizing corporations: If there is no synergy between different divisions then you should spin the company (at least Russel Ackoff is behind me on this). On the other hand, having these two divisions together allows them to hedge off each other. If rentals get unpopular and everyone starts streaming then the business as a whole isn't in the red. So there might be good reasons to keep them together.. but I don't think it's a no-brainer.
  - shock-value 15y ago
    On the back-end they are different -- but from the consumer's perspective renting and streaming are just different means to the same end: watching content. If you have a movie you'd like to watch in mind -- regardless of whether it's available on instant or not -- it's a lot easier to just search on one website then be forced to go through two (and maintain two accounts). Not to mention that it makes sense to maintain user ratings for both instant and rented content in the same pool (for movie recommendations etc). I see a lot of synergy there.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      I'm not so sure about them being so different on the backend. Sure, one half mails a lot of stuff, and the other has lots of servers, but wouldn't there be a lot of overlap in the "dealing with publishers and licensing" department?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
assistantpilot 15y ago
Bezos: For better or worse, it is really not a part of our culture to look at things defensively. We rarely say, “Oh my God, we’ve got to do something about that existential threat.” Maybe one day we’ll become extinct because of that deficiency in our nature. I don’t know. We look at things through a different lens. We say, “Oh, here’s this incredible phenomenon called social networking. How can we be inspired by that to make our business better?” I hope we find something. This is precisely the reason that I think Google will not succeed in their Google Plus approach to social networking.
- sahaj 15y ago
  I won't elaborate too much on this point because it's been made many times here in the past, but I'm pretty sure you don't understand G+ if you think G+ is a short sighted move to combat just Facebook.
sumukh1 15y ago
Seems like the full page link is broken. You can use Readability by clicking on readability view here, or just go straight to the multipage article http://rdd.me/rdnylmgg http://rdd.me/rdnylmgg
yequalsx 15y ago
I was planning to get an iPad. I thought Apple would update the iPad 2 for the holidays but they didn't. Then Amazon came out with announcement of the Kindle Fire. For less than the price of an iPad I can get 2 Kindle Fires and 1 Kindle Touch. I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage. By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope. There is also Amazon's customer service. I bought my first Apple product in June (a Macbook Pro) and the two times I've had to talk to Apple's repair people about an issue they acted as if I'm an apostate. I've had nothing but amazing customer service from Amazon. I think Bezos has a hit with the Fire. The only tablet that will compete with the Fire this holiday season is the iPad.
- r00fus 15y ago
  >The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage. > By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope. These two statements are at odds with each other. 8GB is paltry for any amount of video or music (on my iPhone, a full 13GB is music/audio - I listen a LOT of books on tape and podcasts). The cloud for personal media is unreliable for a big chunk of time as many mobile providers either don't provide coverage, bandwidth or quota to fulfill my needs... it's not clear that 8GB+CloudDrive will do this (it would be great if CloudDrive 2.0 would just treat your local available store as a giant cache). Proof will be in the pudding. However, given that Amazon has yet to tell us how many Kindles it's sold or how much money they have made on them, it's unclear how we'll be able to gauge it's success.
  - yequalsx 15y ago
    The statements are not contradictory at all. Some local storage is needed for people who will out of range of wi-fi. Like airplane travelers. But they don't need a lot of local storage. People just need enough local storage to bridge the gaps in wi-fi coverage. Internet access is ubiquitous but it isn't universal. While on the internet Fire users will stream their content. They don't need a high powered device to do this as Amazon's cloud infrastructure will be doing some of the work. While off the internet the device just needs enough power to play videos, read books, and play songs and games. This doesn't require a heavy duty processor.
pnathan 15y ago
Jeff Bezos understands what I want from the vast majority of my merchant interactions: > Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
gabaix 15y ago
I always remember Jeff Bezos' 3 lessons: obsess over customers, invent, think long term. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA I love the way he unfolds his ideas simply and disrupts markets, one at a time.
spullara 15y ago
I just cancelled my Kindle Fire order (which I made the day of the announcement, perhaps too hasty) based on the review by David Pogue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/personaltech/the-fire-aside-amazons-lower-priced-kindles-also-shine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/personaltech/th... My take away is that if they can't get the included apps to perform well, it is likely not a device I will enjoy using. I'd rather pay another $300 for something that is a joy to use. Probably be better off using the Kindle app on an iPod Touch.
- notatoad 15y ago
  if you can afford to spend an extra $300 like that, and like to read, you owe it to yourself to get an e-ink kindle.
  - spullara 15y ago
    When they fix the flicker on page turning, I will.
    - notatoad 15y ago
      have you used an e-reader? it's not really anything that needs fixing. when you see it on youtube the flicker looks annoying, but when you're actually reading a book you don't notice it at all.
      - spullara 15y ago
        I have used an e-reader. It is annoying for me. Since they are trying to fix it, I am going to assume that I am not the only one that hates it.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      That's how e-Ink currently works. On the other hand you've got good contrast, especially in direct sunlight. Also battery life lasts for a whole week with the Internet connection on and for a month (at least) without that connection active. Reading entire novels on my Kindle 3 is an enjoyable experience. Reading long essays on an iPad has given me nausea - as I could see the reflection of the light above and my freaking face in the screen glare of that iPad. The contrast is really poor in a strong light environment. Also the battery died during a single flight from Europe to the US, when I needed it the most. Of course, the E-Ink Kindle is only good for reading books or long essays. It's not an iPad replacement, but the one thing it does well can't be matched by devices with normal LCD or Amoled screens.
jluan 15y ago
Post-PC? Post-Web? Wired, what do those terms actually, practically mean? Companies and articles that bring up these artificial distinctions promote a hipster cooler-than-thou that is based only on perception...
- paganel 15y ago
  It means nothing. It's Web 3.0 all over again.
- forensic 15y ago
  They're a magazine/glorified blog. Their job is not to make things clear, it is to mystify and amaze and awe.
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  Wired defines Post-PC at the same time it introduces the term > the post-PC era—in which the desktop is replaced by lean, portable, gesture-driven tablets They also define post-web: > in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center. though I'll admit the latter definition is lame, the first one is reasonable.
gfodor 15y ago
The big question for me is if all these startups bootstrapping on EC2 are going to wake up one day and decide they need their own servers. The smart money is on "No" being the answer to this question: the switching costs are so unbelievably high, and each day that goes by AWS manages to release features that reduce the surface area of reasons you'd need to do so. So, it basically looks like the current generation of startups are going to grow up on AWS. You can imagine the implications of this for Amazon's profits.
- regularfry 15y ago
  The flip side is that EC2 is expensive for what it provides in terms of server power per dollar, and switching costs are considerably lower if you're doing the smart thing and already taking advantage of provider redundancy. Amazon may be ahead now, but they can't stop swimming.
muayguy 15y ago
So,... I'm in Europe... can I use this thing and have access to the streaming or not? I read somewhere that because the data you stream would reside in Amazon's datacenters and Amazon is a US company all the information would "belong" to them, and thus, making it vulnerable to US law. Is this definitive?
ableal 15y ago
Notable observation by Levy: "Replacing the hardware is no more complicated or emotionally involved than changing a flashlight battery." This is followed, in the next paragraph, by the "you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia" observation already remarked on in another comment. Not enough attention is being given to this aspect - the device is mostly irrelevant, the 'appstore' account is key. In time, the user accounts will eventually accumulate a significant amount of value. However, these accounts are designed as personal and non-transferable. A couple of years into the wide use of the appstores, in practice, they work as if the "used" content is of no value. But perhaps soon we will have divorce lawyers settling who keeps the house, the car and the Amazon (or iTunes) account ...
freemarketteddy 15y ago
>It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers. Blah Blah Blah....A sufficiently ambitious kid could make something like that in his basement!
- chadgeidel 15y ago
  Didn't "a sufficiently ambitious kid" already try this with the Crunchpad/JooJoo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
  - freemarketteddy 15y ago
    Yes and in fact what he did was more ambitious than just forking android. Since I am getting downvoted let me clarify....There is nothing special in the Kindle....It just uses ordinary hardware with an open source operating system...yes any kid could make something like that....But what amazon is really selling is the services they have built through which people are going to buy content on the kindle!

188 points by ssclafani 15y ago

Volpe 15y ago

I'm not sure highlighting Amazon's Kindle Fire's reliance on 'streaming' over 'local storage' is a clear "positive vs negative". You can't stream without a (reasonable) internet connection... Seems more of a trade-off than an improvement.

johnthedebs 15y ago
Seems more of a trade-off than an improvement. That's exactly the point. Instead of trying to compete directly with the iPad, Amazon is serving a different part of the market.

dgurney 15y ago

Thank you for linking to the single page version of that.

xianshou 15y ago

I wish the authors of adapted metaphors were forced to map their altered versions to the original. Example: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. The Four Horsemen of Technology include Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Which goes with which? I vote Amazon for Conquest (of the Internet), Google for Famine (of attention span, and possibly design sense), Facebook for War (over friends, likes and popularity), and Apple for Death (of freedom). N.B. The preceding intended for humor only. Any attempt to interpret seriously will meet with swift rebuttal.

etha 15y ago
Conquest? Isn't it Pestilence?

thesteamboat 15y ago

The quote that spoke to me in the article > When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia. I know many people don't mind living in walled garden, especially if it's very pretty, but it seems unhealthy to me. Has this stopped being a scary thing to people?

patio11 15y ago
It was never a scary thing for people. The entire walled-garden-curated-experience versus open-standards-loose-confederation-of-providers generates heated discussion only among a small, small sliver of geeks. For most of the population, this is an irrelevant technical detail like what flavor the CMOS on the device is. Users lack the insight and vocabulary to even identify which world a particular device or ecosystem belongs to. (So do geeks, because this is primarily a matter of tribal affiliation rather than technical reality, but that's another matter entirely.) The underlying philosophy of your device matters not a whit to a 14 year old girl. She wants to listen to the same music, read the same books, and watch the same movies that her friends do. These are her core requirements for your device. The rest is boring geekery.
- ryanwaggoner 15y ago
  Off-topic: Patrick, you strike me as a geek's geek. And that's a compliment. So why is it that so many of your HN comments have you shrewdly observing the world as seen from the vantage point of non-geeks? About 80% of the time, I can tell I'm reading one of your comments because of this penchant you have for telling geeks that the things they're arguing about don't matter to normal people or to businesses. How did you develop your understanding of non-geeks? Bonus question: what do you think about QR codes :)
  - ericflo 15y ago
    I'm not patio11, but I have noticed something interesting about QR codes. All of the interactions with my tech/geek/entrepreneur friends seem to intimate that they think QR codes are kind of a weird thing that will never catch on with normal people so they don't use it. However, I recently saw my mom get out her phone and take a picture of one. Then independently I saw two more of my non-technical friends do it. Interestingly enough, I think QR codes are one thing that, at least anecdotally, are in the process of "skipping" geeks and going straight into the mainstream.

dangero 15y ago

"Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times." That's pretty enlightening. This guy is brilliant because he constantly reminds himself of the fundamentals of business, and is keenly aware that he easily gets off track from those fundamentals. It seems as humans, we're very prone to forgetting the most basic of lessons, and unless we constantly refresh on them, we can easily get off track. It puts things in perspective like the whole Qwikster/Netflix debacle, or the recent talk of bloat at Google. At a very basic level, these issues are signs that the people in charge may have gotten so caught up in the day to day that the lost their "firm grasp of the obvious". Since in both cases the mistakes are "obvious" to people on the outside.

cop359 15y ago
The Qwikster/Netflix thing is not at all simple As far as I understand streaming and renting are two unrelated businesses. On the surface, there is no good reason they should be tied to each other. It one of the very basics of organizing corporations: If there is no synergy between different divisions then you should spin the company (at least Russel Ackoff is behind me on this). On the other hand, having these two divisions together allows them to hedge off each other. If rentals get unpopular and everyone starts streaming then the business as a whole isn't in the red. So there might be good reasons to keep them together.. but I don't think it's a no-brainer.
- shock-value 15y ago
  On the back-end they are different -- but from the consumer's perspective renting and streaming are just different means to the same end: watching content. If you have a movie you'd like to watch in mind -- regardless of whether it's available on instant or not -- it's a lot easier to just search on one website then be forced to go through two (and maintain two accounts). Not to mention that it makes sense to maintain user ratings for both instant and rented content in the same pool (for movie recommendations etc). I see a lot of synergy there.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    I'm not so sure about them being so different on the backend. Sure, one half mails a lot of stuff, and the other has lots of servers, but wouldn't there be a lot of overlap in the "dealing with publishers and licensing" department?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

assistantpilot 15y ago

Bezos: For better or worse, it is really not a part of our culture to look at things defensively. We rarely say, “Oh my God, we’ve got to do something about that existential threat.” Maybe one day we’ll become extinct because of that deficiency in our nature. I don’t know. We look at things through a different lens. We say, “Oh, here’s this incredible phenomenon called social networking. How can we be inspired by that to make our business better?” I hope we find something. This is precisely the reason that I think Google will not succeed in their Google Plus approach to social networking.

sahaj 15y ago
I won't elaborate too much on this point because it's been made many times here in the past, but I'm pretty sure you don't understand G+ if you think G+ is a short sighted move to combat just Facebook.

sumukh1 15y ago

Seems like the full page link is broken. You can use Readability by clicking on readability view here, or just go straight to the multipage article http://rdd.me/rdnylmgg http://rdd.me/rdnylmgg

yequalsx 15y ago

I was planning to get an iPad. I thought Apple would update the iPad 2 for the holidays but they didn't. Then Amazon came out with announcement of the Kindle Fire. For less than the price of an iPad I can get 2 Kindle Fires and 1 Kindle Touch. I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage. By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope. There is also Amazon's customer service. I bought my first Apple product in June (a Macbook Pro) and the two times I've had to talk to Apple's repair people about an issue they acted as if I'm an apostate. I've had nothing but amazing customer service from Amazon. I think Bezos has a hit with the Fire. The only tablet that will compete with the Fire this holiday season is the iPad.

r00fus 15y ago
>The Kindle Fire is the Chromebook Google should have built. People aren't prepared to have absolutely everything on the cloud. People read while on the train or in a plane. There needs to be some local storage. > By utilizing Amazon's cloud infrastructure I'm guessing the Fire doesn't need a large amount of local storage or a large amount of RAM. Amazon is providing a top of the line user experience with less than top of the line hardware. This is my hope. These two statements are at odds with each other. 8GB is paltry for any amount of video or music (on my iPhone, a full 13GB is music/audio - I listen a LOT of books on tape and podcasts). The cloud for personal media is unreliable for a big chunk of time as many mobile providers either don't provide coverage, bandwidth or quota to fulfill my needs... it's not clear that 8GB+CloudDrive will do this (it would be great if CloudDrive 2.0 would just treat your local available store as a giant cache). Proof will be in the pudding. However, given that Amazon has yet to tell us how many Kindles it's sold or how much money they have made on them, it's unclear how we'll be able to gauge it's success.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  The statements are not contradictory at all. Some local storage is needed for people who will out of range of wi-fi. Like airplane travelers. But they don't need a lot of local storage. People just need enough local storage to bridge the gaps in wi-fi coverage. Internet access is ubiquitous but it isn't universal. While on the internet Fire users will stream their content. They don't need a high powered device to do this as Amazon's cloud infrastructure will be doing some of the work. While off the internet the device just needs enough power to play videos, read books, and play songs and games. This doesn't require a heavy duty processor.

pnathan 15y ago

Jeff Bezos understands what I want from the vast majority of my merchant interactions: > Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren’t they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

gabaix 15y ago

I always remember Jeff Bezos' 3 lessons: obsess over customers, invent, think long term. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA I love the way he unfolds his ideas simply and disrupts markets, one at a time.

spullara 15y ago

I just cancelled my Kindle Fire order (which I made the day of the announcement, perhaps too hasty) based on the review by David Pogue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/personaltech/the-fire-aside-amazons-lower-priced-kindles-also-shine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/personaltech/th... My take away is that if they can't get the included apps to perform well, it is likely not a device I will enjoy using. I'd rather pay another $300 for something that is a joy to use. Probably be better off using the Kindle app on an iPod Touch.

notatoad 15y ago
if you can afford to spend an extra $300 like that, and like to read, you owe it to yourself to get an e-ink kindle.
- spullara 15y ago
  When they fix the flicker on page turning, I will.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    have you used an e-reader? it's not really anything that needs fixing. when you see it on youtube the flicker looks annoying, but when you're actually reading a book you don't notice it at all.
    - spullara 15y ago
      I have used an e-reader. It is annoying for me. Since they are trying to fix it, I am going to assume that I am not the only one that hates it.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    That's how e-Ink currently works. On the other hand you've got good contrast, especially in direct sunlight. Also battery life lasts for a whole week with the Internet connection on and for a month (at least) without that connection active. Reading entire novels on my Kindle 3 is an enjoyable experience. Reading long essays on an iPad has given me nausea - as I could see the reflection of the light above and my freaking face in the screen glare of that iPad. The contrast is really poor in a strong light environment. Also the battery died during a single flight from Europe to the US, when I needed it the most. Of course, the E-Ink Kindle is only good for reading books or long essays. It's not an iPad replacement, but the one thing it does well can't be matched by devices with normal LCD or Amoled screens.

jluan 15y ago

Post-PC? Post-Web? Wired, what do those terms actually, practically mean? Companies and articles that bring up these artificial distinctions promote a hipster cooler-than-thou that is based only on perception...

paganel 15y ago
It means nothing. It's Web 3.0 all over again.
forensic 15y ago
They're a magazine/glorified blog. Their job is not to make things clear, it is to mystify and amaze and awe.
LiveTheDream 15y ago
Wired defines Post-PC at the same time it introduces the term > the post-PC era—in which the desktop is replaced by lean, portable, gesture-driven tablets They also define post-web: > in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center. though I'll admit the latter definition is lame, the first one is reasonable.

gfodor 15y ago

The big question for me is if all these startups bootstrapping on EC2 are going to wake up one day and decide they need their own servers. The smart money is on "No" being the answer to this question: the switching costs are so unbelievably high, and each day that goes by AWS manages to release features that reduce the surface area of reasons you'd need to do so. So, it basically looks like the current generation of startups are going to grow up on AWS. You can imagine the implications of this for Amazon's profits.

regularfry 15y ago
The flip side is that EC2 is expensive for what it provides in terms of server power per dollar, and switching costs are considerably lower if you're doing the smart thing and already taking advantage of provider redundancy. Amazon may be ahead now, but they can't stop swimming.

muayguy 15y ago

So,... I'm in Europe... can I use this thing and have access to the streaming or not? I read somewhere that because the data you stream would reside in Amazon's datacenters and Amazon is a US company all the information would "belong" to them, and thus, making it vulnerable to US law. Is this definitive?

ableal 15y ago

Notable observation by Levy: "Replacing the hardware is no more complicated or emotionally involved than changing a flashlight battery." This is followed, in the next paragraph, by the "you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia" observation already remarked on in another comment. Not enough attention is being given to this aspect - the device is mostly irrelevant, the 'appstore' account is key. In time, the user accounts will eventually accumulate a significant amount of value. However, these accounts are designed as personal and non-transferable. A couple of years into the wide use of the appstores, in practice, they work as if the "used" content is of no value. But perhaps soon we will have divorce lawyers settling who keeps the house, the car and the Amazon (or iTunes) account ...

freemarketteddy 15y ago

>It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers. Blah Blah Blah....A sufficiently ambitious kid could make something like that in his basement!

chadgeidel 15y ago
Didn't "a sufficiently ambitious kid" already try this with the Crunchpad/JooJoo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo
- freemarketteddy 15y ago
  Yes and in fact what he did was more ambitious than just forking android. Since I am getting downvoted let me clarify....There is nothing special in the Kindle....It just uses ordinary hardware with an open source operating system...yes any kid could make something like that....But what amazon is really selling is the services they have built through which people are going to buy content on the kindle!