The entire larger point of the post seems to be being missed, which isn't specifically about Amazon Prime at all. The point is that the big players in the onlin

The entire larger point of the post seems to be being missed, which isn't specifically about Amazon Prime at all. The point is that the big players in the online services space are competing in a "my way or the highway" fashion that ends up making everything a little worse. You may not agree with Arment's take on Amazon Instant Video -- personally, I'm a Prime customer but haven't been interested in Amazon's video service because it seemed to mostly overlap with Netflix and because until fairly recently getting it on my TV was more of a pain than I was willing to put up with, because I have an Apple TV and Amazon and Apple wouldn't cross the street to piss on each other if they were on fire. But Google Maps is no longer used for iOS's native map program in large part because Google wanted access to iOS customers Apple didn't want to give, and because of that iOS native maps are worse (and Google lost tens of millions of map users). Google is making all their services a little worse by trying to tie everything up with Google+. Amazon's refusal to support EPUB makes my Kindle a little worse. And so on and so on. HN readers seem to engage in a lot of debate over whether Google and Amazon are "better" than Apple when it comes to ecosystem lock-in. But all of those services only work with approved devices using approved players with approved content. What you're arguing about is the size of the cage you're in.