Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

wired.com

188 pointsssclafani70 comments

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?

"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.

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.

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.

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?

No. And that's one of the problems. For DVD rentals, no licensing is required. All Netflix has to do is purchase the consumer DVDs and ship them to people who want them. Streaming, on the other hand, requires lots of complex negotiations with the rights-holders.

--and one reason the company gave for wanting to split in 2 is that content owners were insisting on counting DVD customers in calculations of royalties due.

> wouldn't there be a lot of overlap in the "dealing with publishers and licensing" department?

AFAIK rental and streaming rights are quite different (one is old-school simple model, another is a yucky "digital" that many publishers are scared of).

i'm pretty sure i read somewhere that the overlap in the "dealing with licensing" department was the problem. publishers were using netflix's diversity as a mark against them in negotiations, and the streaming unit could get better deals if they didn't have to be responsible for the DVD unit.

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.

>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.

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.

You can get an idea of this with their MP3 Cloud Player for Android. I keep a minimum of music on it for gaps in coverage and things I listen to very frequently, but it easily shifts to "cloud mode" and streams well on 4g/wifi.

Chromebooks have at least 16GB of storage for caching things locally. For example, I believe that the Kindle app for Chrome supports offline reading.

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.

Conquest? Isn't it Pestilence?

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?

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.

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 :)

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.

QR codes are fun interesting magical fantastic amazing tech.

The exception that proves the rule :)

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?

A combination of bloody-minded contrarianism and having my monthly food budget be acutely dependent on my ability to successfully model the thought processes of 48 year old non-technical women.

QR codes

The US will learn what Japan has learned: QR codes are an inferior way to get people to visit a page compared to an interaction like "Google for 'Old Spice guy'", where 'Old Spice guy' is a keyword purposely chosen to uniquely refer to a page under your control.

But wouldn't that only work if you were certain you could win the seo battle for that particular keyword?

On the other hand, you own and control that qr code.

Choose a unique keyword to target. Don't use a popular word with lots of SEO attention as your new brand name.

Yes, but given that the keyword isn't a real word but a purpose-created microphrase, you're going to ROFLstomp over everyone else on SEO for it. e.g. This post will win for [ROFLstomp SEO], probably within a day.

Just googled ROFLstomp SEO. This post is number one. Only took 6 hours.

Patrick makes money, and runs a business. What normal users (which I assume form the majority of his customers).. what they want is high on his list of important things.

Any geek selling (or wishing to sell) to non-geeks (i.e., the vast majority of people) should likewise endeavor to get wise about non-geek opinions tout de suite.

The question is this: Do non-geeks not care or are they just slower than geeks to find out that they care, or are there underlying economic dynamics that will inevitably lead to a point where they must care?

I think the answer to that question is so varied in different situations that any regular-people-don't-care observation has very little predictive power. You could easily be wrong either way.

Also, caring about something is sometimes very indrect. Sometimes you care about the price of something not knowing that it means to care about some obscure piece of proprietary technology.

My personal concern with the walled garden is that a lot of the content I care about is niche 25 year old+ stuff (like old Amiga computer magazines). Ordinary users will learn to pick up on this as/when/if they start running into situations where they lose access to content because a provider stops providing access to something they care about or goes out of business.

I have no idea what portion of regular users will ever even want to access content that is obscure enough at any point in time to not be offered by providers like Amazon, but my guess is it's never going to be all that huge, and as long as devices like the Kindle offers some way of getting user supplied content onto it, then it will likely never matter all that much to ordinary users.

This is what it boils down to, I think: A walled garden is fine as long as there's a public park outside where you can do the stuff that's frowned upon in the walled garden. If I have to pick one or the other, on the other hand, I'd pick the public park any day.

I'm getting more and more inclined to pick up a Kindle. My biggest issue is that I refuse to buy DRM'd content because of the walled garden issue, and so the content offering has not yet been compelling enough.

It will never replace a more open device for me, but they're cheap enough that picking them up for the purpose of media delivery on rental plans of just stuff I don't care if I own would be attractive even if buying DRM'd content is not.

After all, I pay a fortune in cable fees to add in all the available movie channels - if Amazon offered me an option with similar selections of content that'd cost me a similar amount every month (whether charged monthly or per download/view), then I'd have no real reason to care if it's a walled garden.

If you are concerned with your books being DRM'd and Amazon disappearing (as corporate megaliths do from time to time cough SGI, Sun, DEC cough), I would suggest downloading them onto your 'real' computer, saving off the files, and then unwrapping the DRM.

Why would they care? The walled-garden experiences tend to be better, often by a lot.

Oh, there are many potential reasons. Overpriced components, restrictive rules (e.g no porn/satire/politics), unnecessary and complex dependencies between features/plans/versions (Microsoft is specializing in those), interoperatility/data portability issues, little choice of devices/software/content, forced upgrades or end of life policies, privacy issues due to centralized data mining, clashes between a vendor's business model and consumer interests, inflated prices caused by the cost or effort of switching to a different vendor/provider, lack of competition leading to bad service, etc.

Generally, what walled gardens do is to partially suspend market forces (on the inside) replacing them by a planned economy. Sometimes that enables more streamlined experiences, as you say, or reduced complexity, sometimes it doesn't. It can certainly work well, particularly if there is a sufficient number of medium sized walled gardens that compete with each other and have some incentive to interoperate.

Some problems with walled gardens become bigger with size and others become smaller, so there's a tradeoff, and it's hard to tell when the system turns nasty or boring. It's not necessrily a big deal though.

I think it's only scary if you can see the walled garden. There are a lot of people out there who can barely manage to get pictures off of their digital cameras.

I think to some people the Kindle Fire will just make sense. They don't have the kinds of abstractions that most geeks have formed about digital information. They might not understand where the walls of the walled garden are. They just want something that works.

The majority of video games have been operating under the walled garden model since the days of the NES; while such limitations are annoying, I hardly consider them evil. (As a geek, the frustration is somewhat ameliorated by the knowledge that I can choose to trade time for additional freedom using various gray-hat methods.)

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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/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.

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.

When they fix the flicker on page turning, I will.

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.

I'm not sure why I would be modded down for pointing out how e-ink currently works and how I don't like it and won't be using it until they fix it. Someone mentioned that with the Kindle Touch they have pushed the flicker to every 6 page views and have reduced its jarring effect. Presumably there are other people that also think that e-ink, as it currently works, isn't that great because of this problem. I've mostly read books on my iPhone 4 using Amazon's Kindle app and I find it to be much more enjoyable, YMMV. So, when they fix that problem, that it currently has, I will probably get one -- which is why I have been buying books on Kindle instead of iBooks in the first place. You are lucky you can enjoy e-ink, I wish I could.

It'd be nice if you could elaborate on why the flicker is important enough to you that it outweighs the obvious benefits of e-ink. Up until I read this thread I never even considered it as a 'thing', it surprises me anyone could care about the particular way a reading device transitions between pages, as long as it's fast enough. It seems like the least important aspect of what makes a reading experience on a device good vs bad.

The portability and convenience of the Kindle DX has basically changed my life as I now have been plowing through all those technical books I've been meaning to read over the years.

I think it's a bit difficult to explain this to someone that isn't experiencing it as a problem. It's similar to the way some people react to DLP projectors with color wheels ("rainbow effect") while some don't. People are sensitive do different things. I find the flicker jarring even though it's short. I do enjoy the benefits of e-ink, but I'm perfectly fine with staring at a backlight display for hours, so I'm OK with reading on an iPad as well.

Strangely, I had the same reaction as yours in the beginning, each time I flipped a page on my Kindle I "saw" the dots flicking. Then, around one week after, I completely forgot, until you reminded me about the issue today.

So, in short, except if we have a very different neural system, which is not likely, the annoyance should disappear soon enough.

I didn't mod you down, but it does seem a bit strange to focus on the screen flicker. It's a bit jarring at first, but in a way it's visual feedback that you've turned the page, and it doesn't affect your eyes like a backlit panel would. Is it purely an aesthetic problem?

>Also the battery died during a single flight from Europe to the US, when I needed it the most.

Really? I was playing "Galaxy of Fire 2" for a whole flight and the battery lasted from Germany to USA east coast.

I had a detour through Amsterdam as there was no direct flight for me to San Francisco. Perhaps the expression single flight was not the most fortunate. English is not my native language.

Fair enough. I didn't think you were lying, I just wondered why your battery life was so much worse than mine.

It's not a bug. It's a feature. Consider it a page transition effect.

Just curious, have you ever owned an e-ink reader, or is this just from observation? I'm not a fan of the flicker, either, but the truth is, I don't notice it while actually using the device.

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.

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.

The bookeen odyssey[2] looks more interesting as an e-ink tablet. While it isn't out yet(it'll be out in 22/11), they made an impressive demo of the technology[1], showing a really fast display.

They also have strong processor(cortex-a8, 800mhz), so web browsing will probably be much nicer and fun than the kindle.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxwceUvxlCo [2]http://www.bookeen.com/en/cybook/odyssey

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

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...

It means nothing. It's Web 3.0 all over again.

They're a magazine/glorified blog. Their job is not to make things clear, it is to mystify and amaze and awe.

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.

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?

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

>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!

Didn't "a sufficiently ambitious kid" already try this with the Crunchpad/JooJoo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JooJoo

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!

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