Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
You're not addressing the key point here: Amazon's lack of product focus.
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What product focus? On what?
Amazon is 100 different companies!
(AWS, AUDIBLE, CREATESPACE, AMAZON PUBLISHING, Goodreads, Comixology, LAB126, Ivona, Liquavista, Kiva, Alexa, A9, Twitch, Zappos, Diapers.com and on and on...)
Here:
http://www.quora.com/List-of-all-Ama...s-subsidiaries
http://lists10.com/wp-content/upload...zon-brands.png
What you call lack of focus is what others consider Amazon's scope.
It is their insurance against the market changing and leaving them behind.
Like Borders or Sony or Blackberry or Kodak or Lotus or Word Perfect or any of a thousand companies that focused on the next quarter so tightly they focused themselves out of business.
They are a conglomerate like GE or Toshiba or Mitsubishi. They just happen to be focused on the consumer and services space more than old-school manufacturing. Retail and books is just a tiny part of the business. And so is the phone.
The stuff that offends you so much is from Lab126 whose mission is precisely to produce consumer electronics hardware. eReaders and tablets, yes, but also media streamers and (soon) home automation. If their Bluetooth speaker/PDA annoys you so much, get some pepto for when the voice actuated thermostat or door lock or TV set or 3D printer comes out. Or something else entirely. They own a toolkit of technologies ranging from voice recognition to color displays that they are looking to make money off any way they can. Whether you or I or stock speculators approve of it or not.
Kobo is a one note company. They sell ereaders and other people's ebooks to some success in some markets and less in others. When they trued to pkay in tablets they thudded and people got fired. Now they're back where they were when Indigo flipped them.
They have to focus because that's all they have. They succeed through partners where they find them and flounder when they don't because Rakuten has shown little interest in doing anything special for them.
Expecting Amazon to go after the same niches as Kobo isn't reasonable; Kobo lives and dies with their hardware. Amazon has other fish to fry in addition to the ones already in the pan. More importantly, it isn't wise for Amazon to he chasing after every last hobbyist buyer out there.
There is always the danger that they might *succeed*.