Maybe you don't like it, and you are fully within your rights to cancel, but it is not abuse. They can or should be able to carry whatever products they damn well please.
Sure, but it flatly contradicts everything Bezos says in this letter, and elsewhere, about Amazon being customer-focused rather than competitor-focused.
A truly customer-focused company would sell the products its customers wanted, even if they competed with the company's own-brand products. And demand for these competing products would be seen as a spur to improve their own.
I personally don't think the Amazon's talk of customer-focus is entirely marketing fluff, but I do think it's unevenly applied. Petty, anti-customer, monopolistic business practices have been a mainstay of the tech industry for years, and it's inevitable that they would infect Amazon to some extent.
Amazon stopped selling players that don't support Amazon Prime Video. That can been seen as first-order customer unfriendly, but second-order customer-centric, if you take the view that Amazon Prime Video is a consumer benefit overall. (I do, but I'm still annoyed that I can't get Apple TV on Amazon.)
Context: I'll admit to being a fairly rabid Amazon fan (no other conflicts, other than as a retail shareholder). I still cross-shop NewEgg (to support anti-patent-trolling), Ebay, Aliexpress and others, but Amazon wins more than its share of my purchase traffic.
Amazon's customer centric nature is generally pretty good, but they toss it aside at times. AIV on Android is one of those times (took them years to release the app and when they did it required a completely screwy install)
nah dog, Apple has said they are free to make an Apple TV app. But they won't for some reason. They don't even have to sell items through the app and incur Apple's cut.
I don't think it does contradict anything he says about being customer focused. In my opinion, and experience, it doesn't mean 'completely ignore your competitors and sell their products on your own store', it means 'Develop your products by listening to what customers tell you and not by watching and copying what your competitors do'.
If you take that as the intent behind the quote then it's kinda parallel to the issue of whether to sell chromecast or not.
I think that was his point, he's critical of Amazon because they lied about their reasoning for not carrying the products, not questioning the legality of not carrying specific products.
I thought that was obvious, and a charitable interpretation of his post would've made this clear, I think.
Yep. Several CSRs told me "Oh it's out of stock" (not explaining the 404, or no "marketplace" vendors). I escalated. Then I was told the Chromecast was not sold due to "too many complaints". A supervisor then flat out denied that, as well as denied there being any ban on any such product.
I asked about the Apple TV. After other lame "stocking" issues, a supervisor said "oh, we don't have licenses to sell Apple TV" and went on about how there's all sorts of legal issues.
It's vile for a company that's supposedly pro-consumer.
Amazon and Apple have had a long patchy history when it comes to selling Apple products.
Primarily it comes down to Apple's need to control the pricing of their products and Amazon's desire to drop prices far into the realms of lossmaking, which in part is due to their customer centricity. I cannot comment on this specific case but it is not always necessarily as clear cut as you think.
As an aside, the customer obsession is not fluff. It is deeply engrained within the business and is taken very seriously. Any decision that is not customer centric (e.g. Halting the sale of Harper Collins titles) is usually escalated to Diego (head of Retail) if not to Jeff himself.
Any business is well within their rights to make money and preserve their self interests, and occasionally strategic decisions may well clash with the culture so not every decision Amazon makes will be perfectly customer centric. With that said, from both the inside and outside I've witnessed really great customer obsession on the whole especially when compared to other businesses.
The problem is that they won't allow third parties to sell them on marketplace. Even if Apple won't sell to Amazon, as long as third parties want to list they should be allowed to and it shouldn't cause problems. (I'm probably missing something; what is it?)
Amazon is big enough that they could be seen as abusing their power as the largest online retailer to suppress competitors in other markets. These are products that consumers would reasonably expect Amazon to carry, but they don't because it competes with Amazon's other businesses.
A truly customer-focused company would sell the products its customers wanted, even if they competed with the company's own-brand products. And demand for these competing products would be seen as a spur to improve their own.
I personally don't think the Amazon's talk of customer-focus is entirely marketing fluff, but I do think it's unevenly applied. Petty, anti-customer, monopolistic business practices have been a mainstay of the tech industry for years, and it's inevitable that they would infect Amazon to some extent.