[PaulHoule]

Amazon could be at the late Sears and Robucks phase already where it cares more about people subscribing to Prime than it does selling things.

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…

[pbhjpbhj]

For sales they gave up a good brand, what, 8? years ago when they stopped caring if what they were selling was even a real product and started taking part in the sale of products they know to be fake and/or rip-offs.

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.

[SavageBeast]

AMZN execs are watching AAPL stock go bonkers today on yesterdays AI announcement. APPLE IS DOING AI AND WE ALL NEED NEW PHONES TO USE IT!

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.

[dylan604]

Is Alexa really that primed to be useful? For home devices, maybe. For mobile? The Goog's seems like it would be better primed with its Android devices.

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.

[HaZeust]

Speculating that the brand behind AWS might be in the late Sears phase is hilarious to me.

[PaulHoule]

I'll argue that business is a lot faster paced in the "age of enshitification" than it was in the past so that today a company can decline as much in 4 years as would have previously taken 40.

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.

[dylan604]

Their forced insertion of ads into their streaming content was it for me. There are so many shows that do not say ad supported and available with Prime, yet as soon as I'm watching something that shows me an unexpected ad break, I stop it right there. I doubt there's anyone looking that the specific metric of how many shows stopped being viewed at the ad break, but I can't imagine I'm the only one.

[epolanski]

I always suspected YouTube pays attention at ad breakes because every time they would dare starting a video with 40/50 seconds of unskippable ads (happens on the tv app only, they never dared on desktop/laptop) I just exit the video, reopen it (or another), and I'm served for a goos hour 15 to 25 second ad max.

And yes, I went for Premium which I find outrageously expensive.

[geodel]

Agree. I feel they are getting high on their own supply.

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.