Amazon possibly working on new stand-alone messaging app called Anytime
aftvnews.com
aftvnews.com
It's one thing when bloat is from attempts at software feature differentiation; that's what kills these apps. It's another thing entirely when you're interfacing with product and payment ecosystems, when your features make you the core way in which people live their lives. It'll be damn hard to stick the landing, but Amazon absolutely has to try.
When web-based giants successfully developed and implemented private clouds they served as an aspirational beacon for CIOs to transform their internal technology roadmaps. CxO teams are now greedily eyeing the WeChat experience and saying to themselves "we can do that too!" in a similar manner.
By the way, this type of thinking isn't confined to corporate executives -- WeChat is so appallingly all-encompassing that even pure decentralized plays (e.g. Urbit) use WeChat as a concrete instantiation of the type of end-user-experience to strive for, albeit in more user- and freedom- friendly manners.
if amazon can start selling ads to you, based on what you're talking about, that would be much more desirable than ads based only on viewing/purchasing history.
messaging in particular is also a really viral phenomenon - you choose your app based on where your friends are and you don't switch. having a loyal captive audience is really useful to start selling to, a la wechat payments or other value add services where you can take some transaction fee. this fits very well with amazon's overarching business model of 'middlemanning every transaction'
An Amazon messaging service principally gives you, well, chat with others. Then they build gaming applications that use that infrastructure. Open it up to 3rd parties to use this (like Apple's Game Center, but not constrained to iOS). Now you're getting rent from game developers. It's probably easily integrated with other services (video and music, for shared consumption experiences like when my GF and I, 5k miles apart, want to watch a movie together, not that we'd make use of that, we never have the same movies available on the same service at the same time anyways).
And if they actually do this, note the last feature: chat with businesses. WhatsApp screwed the pooch on that one. My GF is in Argentina, many people use WhatsApp as their primary chat (and often voice) mechanism. Businesses want to use it, but they practically can't. WhatsApp is tied to a single device (maybe get the web client going and you've got two). It's tied to a single mobile device at that. And businesses that tried to use it (often using 3rd party software to make it practical for their use-cases) ended up with accounts closed (that they'd have to reopen, a pain in the ass).
Apple can't offer that feature because they keep their messaging clients tied to their hardware. iOS devices are not practical in many countries still (due to either the local economy being too poor, or the government adding high taxes to iDevices in particular).
Google could have taken this market, but, well they don't have a fucking clue how to pick a goal and stick with it. They keep adding new messaging clients every other month that aren't always compatible with the old ones.
Amazon barely makes hardware (Fire Stick, Kindle, Kindle Fire, the Echo devices). They don't care about winning on hardware, they want to win on services. They're more than happy to offer their stuffs on any device it can run on as long as it increases their presence (which leads to an increase in spending on their platform).
* WhatsApp only produced large amounts of money for the founders but never profited and was intentionally never priced for massive profits.
* Messenger's monitization efforts have only been experimental so far, and those experiments have been lackluster from a revenue standpoint.
* Slack's financials are private and their most recent revenue claims that I have found are two years old but only $30M which would still be substantially far away from the billion dollar range even if they were in the 99th percentile of growth rates for VC backed companies.
In fact, industry estimates are that the market for messaging is growing but still <$10B. When compared to the sort of money that a single company makes from advertising on their search engine, some might say that messaging is still producing very normal human levels of money and nowhere near ungodly territory.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/417780/mobile-messenger-...
I was going to say I can imagine an app that combines FB Messenger, Yelp, Travelocity, OpenTable, GrubHub, and Uber. But WeChat already has all these things (either via companies they own or via partnerships).
Amazon also has Prime, so they can offer millions of subscribers incentives to prime the AnyTime pump.
I'd speculate not, at least not in the US. Here, more people have different types of computers (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, set-top boxes) which are all united mainly by Web browsers / technologies. The Web is naturally - or at least, has been historically - more open and less conducive to walled gardens. Consequently, I think US consumers are used to the experience of getting news from (for example) the Washington Post, shopping on Amazon, and checking email on GMail, while navigating between these sites without too much hassle. This experience has largely been replicated on mobile devices, at least for me, despite the best efforts of Facebook and others to keep me locked in their app outside of mobile Chrome and Safari.
Since the Chinese government won't allow strong foreign competitors to penetrate their domestic market, I have to assume that Facebook, Google, and so forth are targeting other countries with these all-in-one messaging apps. Perhaps India would most resemble China's mobile-dominated market?
Tencent is what it is because competition is banned. China's "internet" is more like AOL from the early 90s, with network performance from the early 2000s at best. Nobody is going to be able to move in WeChat's direction because other governments aren't willing to erect massive censorship infrastructure to kill competition.
Matrix support and total federation integration.
This, I guess, ain't it.
Sadly Microsoft and Google seem incapable of doing it.
As Amazon operationalizes its own physical delivery network (planes, trucks, drones), the USPS is going to be demolished and postal rates will rise dramatically. Amazon accounts link every user one or more physical addresses. Anytime will also link those users to a secure digital "address" appropriate for delivery of sensitive information like financial and medical records.
With this hub in place, Amazon can act as a clearinghouse to functionally displace the physical mail system in the US and throughout the world. Most of what arrives in your mailbox would be more efficiently and securely delivered electronically, but to date there has been no centralized platform to digitally mail items so every bank/medical practice/company has had to create its own internal secure messaging system or rely on email.
Amazon Anywhere can act as the pre-scaled missing link to solve his problem while creating additional benefits to Amazon by functionally requiring anyone without an Amazon account to get one to receive secure communications in the future. It doesn't necessarily have to succeed as an IM or video call platform in order to fulfill this role.
I have five messaging applications on my phone already and there is nothing critical on these platforms that couldn’t be handled by a single, polyglot client.
Yeah, it went exactly as everyone expected.
I would expect a store of Amazons scale to do a far better job of categorising and searching information than what they offer right now. Also discovery of new books is very suboptimal in my opinion.
Which is what? Cloud services? Logistics and Freight Routing? Physical inventory management?
Almost every product they have is a wildly successful variation on a mildly successful already existing product.
AWS, fire TV stick, echo dot, Amazon fresh, audible; all of these are great products / product lines that have little to do with delivery of non perishable goods.
* Amazon doesn't need to develop a new chat system from scratch.
* They can make plenty of money hosting matrix instance servers for private individuals and more importantly enterprises (read: cha-ching!).
* By contributing to matrix project, amazon can "feel good" about to contributing to open source.
* Amazon gets free on-boarding of potential new customers. Use-case: small business sets up their own matrix instance...eventually outgrows that, then turns to AWS, and voila, they migrate their instance to the official/supported AWS matrix instances.
* If matrix - like email - were to eventually become a more widespread de facto messaging/chat protocl, AWS would be leagues ahead of other competitors.
* There is also incentive for the competion (microsoft, google), if Amazon starts this, because like AWS, the others would compete with their own chat/messaging platforms, but enterprise customers would have an easier migration curve - because all chat/messaging would be based on matrix...not unlike email platform migrations today.
Maybe my thoughts above are pipe dreaMS...but beyond the feel good aspects, i firmly believe there are possibilities for businesses to make good amounts of money in this space...and all due to a very good default protocol.
I would much rather they augment my existing phone service.
The Echo worked because it was user oblivious but the new communication features break that model and are decidedly user specific and functionally retarded.
Amazon Echo is pretty good, but it's biggest most annoying flaw is the way it handles multiple users as if they are one.
Google used XMPP initially with Google Talk, but then turned off federation (was it ever on? I recall it was, but that was a long time ago).
We've had greater than a decade now of poor interop between messaging platforms. This is unlikely to change as long as these platforms are owned by people with a vested interest in controlling the experience (tying it to their hardware or other services or ad networks, primarily).