It’s painful to see them give up a good brand just as the moment when a change in technology could have given them wheels…
They cornered so many markets and, surprise, used that position to let every go to shit for a profit. Still at least Bezos got to wave his wang at the World by going to space.
I expect a similar thing to happen when AMZN announces some AI consumer product. Never mind they were in a Prime (ahahah - get it - "PRIME") position to be the first mover here.
An opportunity good and truly squandered.
What I saw from Apple this week shows me that they've been much more focused on making the assistant useful for anything/everything someone could do on their devices. I have not see that kind of focus from anyone else.
4 years ago I bought something from AMZN roughly weekly, today I buy something from them every few months. They'll put up a banner that says "You paid $30 for shipping in the last year" and I'm like, yeah, you want a lot more than that for Prime. They've got the data to show that, at best, I watched about $30 worth of Blu-Ray discs worth of content on Prime Video per year. Add it up and Prime makes no sense for me.
The fact that they have a highly profitable AWS business makes it worse instead of better since they can maintain the perception of normality, even growth, and not have to pay attention to the rest of their business.
Management bullshit that is usually fed to 2nd tier companies by giving examples of Amazon on how the best in industry operates is now actually believed by Amazon itself.
And yes, I went for Premium which I find outrageously expensive.