‘Nobody is using it’: Amazon Spark is not taking off with brands, agencies
digiday.com
digiday.com
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.
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...
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...
The second part of Hanlon's Razor, was to not rule out malice.
> No phrase has been bandied about more than “conspiracy theory” in describing Hersh’s reporting. Critics argue that he’s accusing “hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” How could that be possible?
> [...]
> [I]t is extraordinarily naive to think the government is incapable of keeping a large secret involving dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. I am reminded of this passage from the memoirs of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who knows a thing or two about how government secrecy works. Not only is the idea that you can’t keep secrets in Washington “flatly false,” Ellsberg writes, but by repeating it you’re doing the government’s work for them.
>> [Such sayings] are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public … The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.
> [...]
> The old adage that “three people can only keep a secret if two are dead” is a fantasy, and journalists should stop mindlessly repeating it.
1) https://www.google.com/shopping
2) https://www.amazon.com/Spark/b?ie=UTF8&node=16907772011
3) https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-...
Combine it with the wage collusion case [4] from a few years ago and it's entering the plausible territory
4) http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-job...
Those terms should give you a wealth of information about how and why these strategies work to conceal collusion between competitors.
I just think it's hilarious that these products (AMZN Spark, FB Mail...) are so bad that people believe in conspiracy theories rather than accepting a dry truth as an explanation.
Could it be the output of some Amazon version of Google's "20% 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.
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.
At least I could console myself with the thought that, while I probably wasn't going to make a difference to the world, I wasn't going to harm it. The more conscientious of my colleagues over in the advertising teams didn't have that comfort...
My first involved preparing a user-generated-content website to scale to 200 hits/second. The second saw us attempting to squeeze an HTML animatic editor (like storyboards, but with music and audio) onto a 7" tablet with severely limited memory and CPU.
Of course, as I mentioned above - sometimes just "this is gonna make me a better developer" doesn't quite cut it for two-three years. It's easier to find motivation if something is a challenge and you reckon it's got even a slim chance of making a difference in the real world.
Projects that don't have a market tend to have less politics since no one really gives a single one, so you definitely miss at least on this; or the actual skills of massaging the product into user acceptance (since you don't really have any true users).
Amazon wishes people built their daily lives around shopping at Amazon and would share that with their friends. Amazon wishes people wanted to take pictures of products so you could buy them from Amazon (this was one of the "innovative" features of the Fire Phone, it was called Firefly, and I never used it once in the year or so that I used that generally awful phone). It's like they start from the premise of, "Sell more stuff!", and then build products around that. Anything else that gets into the mix is just a flashy gimmick to get you into the store.
There have been Amazon products that have succeeded, obviously, since they're bigger than god and still growing (and I shop there all the time, and use/like AWS). But, boy, do they suck at consumer technology.
There's a very sound principle within Amazon that one should "work backwards from the customer": pitch ideas for new products based on identifying a clear customer need, then inventing a product that will fulfil that.
But a lot of the pitches I saw were essentially working backwards from sales targets or existing tech - first, invent a customer with an insatiable desire to buy stuff in inexplicably odd ways ("I want to buy stuff by scanning it with my phone!") then invent a product to do that.
The Fire Phone was probably the biggest example of this. I think it just started as somebody deciding that Amazon needed a phone, to drive sales like Android drove web use, and then they chucked in all sort of flashy tech that they happened to have on hand. Such a gigantic pile of WTF.
At least the tablets started out with the idea that people were buying Kindles, listening to Amazon MP3, and watching Amazon Video, and perhaps somebody might want to combine all three in one device. The first Fire tablet was a shoddy pile of minimal-viable-product, but the later ones were fairly nice.
Obviously with the exclusion of the phone, I'm under the impression that Fire TV and Fire Tablets sell pretty well. I know lots of parents who use Fire Tablets for their kids over iPads because they are cheap and the content restriction is really easy. Also, aren't Echo/Alexa-driven products pretty much thriving?
The thing is, I have a lot of this stuff I'm making fun of. I have a Fire TV Stick, I have a Kindle (the old-fashioned kind with an e-ink display), I had a Fire phone. But, I recognize that they are Amazon service delivery platforms. They exist to sell me products from Amazon. It's all part of a big ecosystem where lots of little frictions are removed from my life if I buy from Amazon. In addition to the devices, I have Prime, I have an Amazon Visa card (5% cash back on purchases from Amazon), I've bought a bunch of music from Amazon (and can have it all stored on Amazon when I change devices without having to remember where I bought it from or deal with weird download limits or whatever), etc.
I'm making fun of myself here, basically, because I'm the ridiculous and stupid consumer that Amazon is building all the their ridiculous and stupid consumer products for. But, even I saw through the bullshit that was the Fire phone and found it absolutely ridiculous. And, I have a Nexus tablet and no interest in a Fire tablet, even at a better price than competing Android devices. The value proposition from a standard Android device with the Google apps is higher for me in phones and tablets. I won't likely fall for another Amazon produced phone or tablet. And, I haven't yet seen a compelling reason to invite Alexa into my home.
Definitely odd to shove a weird pseudo-social marketing feed into my shopping app... there’s no way the people behind this actually thought it would catch on, right? If this disappeared tomorrow I don’t think anyone would notice.
Overused names are a pet peeve of mine. "Oh, your speechbot is named Jarvis? How original."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(disambiguation)
Here's spark:
Amazon launches Spark, a shoppable feed of stories and photos (techcrunch.com)
1 Comment: Yes, a new way to help people shop! It's just what we needed ;)
Turns out it's just another social media flop. I'm okay with that.
One thing that’s unclear to me is why they’d use Instagram as their inspiration rather than Pinterest when the latter more clearly lends itself to shopping, and when there’s a natural tie-in with Amazon’s wish lists functionality (totally conceivable to change wish lists into some kind of Amazon pinboards).
If your normal job is working on the ancient Amazon website codebase and holding back the bile you feel as you add yet another "SIGN UP TO PRIME!!!!!!" banner, then a couple of years of being paid to build a green-fields project using the technology of your choice sounds pretty great.
> Spark, which launched in July, is a social feed of photos. It is similar to Instagram, but open only to Prime members.
There is the reason--thinly veiled way to encourage people to buy Prime. Facebook succeeds because "everyone is there." Not everyone can afford Prime.