Echo is a consequence of exploring digital appliances as marketing tools. If you're going to build a device which can voice-interface someone ordering 6 bottles of Tide with extreme ease, doesn't take much more to turn it into a nice music speaker and tell you weather & sports & jokes on request. Echo, Fire, etc are just extensions to feeding the retailing monster.
Do notice how Amazon's innovative foray into cell phones crashed & burned hard - despite being lauded as rather a well-built device. That shows how straying too far doesn't work, and that "far" isn't very.
It's easy to point to one failed product as proof that "straying too far doesn't work", if you can do the mental gymnastics required to classify all their successful products as somehow more connected to their original goal.
While the hardware division was indeed shut down, Amazon did manage to salvage as much as they can.
The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else. It took a lot of focused investment, commitment and trust from the management to give the AWS experiment more time so that it could succeed and eventually it did.
Fire phone was one of Amazon's many experiments. It failed sure, but hey you miss 100% of the changes you don't take.
Just a minor point of correction: Actually SQS was first.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-blog-the-first-five-yea...
"a logistics business, both information and physical"? Really? Calling their massive retail business, original content, and physical devices an "accessory" to their warehousing is an extremely myopic view of Amazon.
Besides, Apple doing the iPod and iPhone is a counter example to your argument, unless you stretch the definition of the core business of a Y2K computer company to be music players and phones.
Cars are more about mechanical engineering than electronics or software. Learning automotive design from scratch when you have no experience and barely any trained staff is not a trivial task.
Worse, a Level 5 autonomous car is not an existing consumer technology. At this point there's nothing to refine, and barely anything that could be bought in to start the refinement process.
Apple might as well go into house building, farming, or food products.
Google Cloud is about ensuring that those two have competition and can't somehow pull an EEE. Extreme scenario: vast majority of world's online businesses are hosted on AWS and Amazon for whatever reason creates their own AWS ad service and forbids or undercuts Google AdWords for everything hosted on AWS.
This is the first time I've seen it shortened to an acronym.
Shipping, motor vehicles, home electronics, bank and finance (UFJ holdings), nuclear power, cameras and optics (Nikon), industrial chemistry, beer brewing (Kirin) and real estate.
EDIT: Samsung does all sorts of things including ship-building, life insurance, construction and advertising.
For example, Apple MacBook Pros have become uncool, expensive, unrepairable and impractical... a giant FU to customers. That business is tettering on failure because they've been hypnotized on elixir of utopian, aspirational design rather than technical, environmental and practical usability. iPhone is the lion's share of Apple's business, and they're losing ground to Android. That's a problem and most other products have plateaued and aren't anywhere near as dominant-capable or category-defining as the smartphone. That means Apple is a basically a banana republic (pun intended) unless they create or retake a category with a non-incrementalist product.
Disclaimer: I own an A1278 13" from 2013 but refuse to buy a $3000 soldered on RAM and SSD laptop that can't be transfered without proprietary service tools and whose glued-on batteries are a PITA to change. Also the low-travel, flush keyboards are terrible. Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.
They sold over 4 million Macs this past quarter, so I don't know what you're going on about here.
Well, they're down YoY, from 4.2 million to... 4.18 million. So in another 200 years, they'll have all disappeared.
Citation required. (other than you refusing to buy one).
> Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.
Please don't do System76, their laptops are pieces of crap. My wife and I have had good experiences with thinkpads though.
You can't compare a conglomerate to an integrated company.