Amazon

Jul 14, 2015 ∞

Antitrust official inappropriately lauds Amazon's "disruptive business model"

Antitrust official inappropriately lauds Amazon’s “disruptive business model”

DOJ antitrust head William J. Baer, speaking at a London antitrust conference:

By conspiring with Apple, which was seeking a fail-safe way to enter the market, five major publishers and Apple reached an agreement to drive the industry to an agency sales model and seize back control over and raise retail pricing of e-books. The department successfully challenged this conspiracy to quash Amazon’s disruptive business model, forcing the defendants to terminate the contractual agreements they had used to effectuate the conspiracy. Since then, Amazon’s disruptive business model has continued to stoke competition in the e-books marketplace.

That is an inappropriate way for a federal antitrust official to speak about a major market participant. Amazon did not make noise about Apple’s ebooks collusion for the good of its customers. They did it because low prices keep them on top, and because no other company is willing to bear the losses Amazon can endure, there is no end to their dominance in sight.

Apple’s attempt to raise prices in cooperation with five publishers did not end well for the Cupertino company and rightly so, but their motivations were logical. Amazon maintains low prices and therefore the illusion that they are doing customers a favor, and in the long run doing authors and publishers a favor by expanding the pool of would-be customers who can afford ebooks.

However, there is at least some truth to the concerns authors and publishers have expressed about Amazon’s dominance. The company is in a position to decide what books a large majority of book buyers can access. It’s a wise short-term strategy both business-wise and legally because it is as quiet and passive as Apple’s conspiracy was bold and aggressive. But long-term it’s likely to expose the company to regulatory inquiry at a time when Amazon is contemplating things like drone delivery, which will likely face stiffer regulation sooner than later, especially when put to retail use.

Of course based on Assistant Attorney General Baer’s comments at the Chatham House Annual Antitrust Conference, Amazon has at least one friend in a position, and a mindset, to lionize them despite questionable competition strategies.

Jul 1, 2015 ∞

Amazon AWS: Good enough for the CIA

Leena Rao has a fascinating background story at Fortune on Amazon Web Services, built around a profile of its leader, Senior Vice President Andy Jassy. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but this bit was particularly interesting:

Netflix’s adoption also gave other big companies and institutions the confidence to try AWS. Its heavyweight corporate customers now include Samsung, Comcast, and pharmaceutical giant Novartis, to name just a few. In 2013, AWS won a contract from the Central Intelligence Agency—a classified deal that became public knowledge when a competitor sued the government over it. Once that news broke, Jassy recalls, “a lot of companies would say, ‘Well, if the security and performance is good [enough] for the CIA, then it’s probably good enough for us.’ ”

Read about the original disclosure of the deal over at Federal Computing World.

May 8, 2015 ∞

The Amazon Noncompete Clause

Here it is, in all its overbroad glory:

During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential Information.

Whew. All that legalese is translatable into American English as:

You can't work in another warehosue that, you know, contains stuff people buy, with money, that is, um, anywhere, pretty much in the world.

The linked report by The Verge resulted in a much-needed revision to the policy, but it’s a powerful reminder that behind all the random stuff we order online are people who are sometimes commoditized and mistreated by their employers.

Image credit: “Amazon.com Customer Service Center (Huntington, West Virginia) 003” by Leonard J. DeFrancisci. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Sep 19, 2014 ∞

Check for lint before trying to replace your iPhone's charging port

My iPhone 5 recently stopped charging, unless I propped the phone upside down against an inclined surface like a lamp stand or a keyboard. I’m not in a position to buy one of those fancy new iPhones, so I shopped around in the internet’s DIY isle.

I found a well-reviewed set of iPhone surgery tools and even a well-reviewed replacement part on Amazon. Armed with those and an instructional YouTube video, I planned to replace the part myself.

Luckily, one of my many neuroses involves exhaustively reading through reviews before I buy anything from Amazon. It’s my favorite part of the site. I don’t even consider products with less than 25 or so reviews.

In a bricks-and-mortar store, you probably only have the staff to ask for advice, and they’re obviously biased. And if you’re anything like me, you probably know far more about the product than they do. Always take advantage of the availability of reviews on Amazon.

Anyway, with the necessary tools in my cart and the video queued up in the Watch Later section of my YouTube account, I headed over to read some reviews. That’s when I found this gem by Amazon user DullJack, who wrote:

First off, if you suspect your charging port is going bad, it probably isn’t. Grab a flashlight and a safety pin/needle, shine the light into the charging port and you will probably see a bunch of lint tightly jammed into the back of the port that is preventing the cable from fully inserting.

But I had looked in there and I didn’t see anything, DullJack. So what gives? He continues:

I looked into my old port before replacing it and it looked clear, but I didn’t shine a light into it.

Ah. I shined a light into it and alas, there it was. I turned my phone off (better safe than sorry when poking around inside your iPhone with anything sharp or metal) and gently used a paper clip to pull out more lint that I would have though could fit in there. Do this over a piece of white paper to get the full effect.

So. Much. Lint.

Then, I plugged it in with the reckless abandon I had used before the problems began. A small white Apple logo appeared in the middle of the screen. The phone booted up and the battery icon showed it was charging. I moved it around in all the common ways that had been causing it to stop charging.

Fixed!

I don’t use exclamation points very often on this site because that’s just not the tone I’m going for over here. But that one was obligatory. The sense of relief I felt upon learning I wouldn’t need to expose my iPhone’s innards to the harsh light of day is something only fellow geeks can understand.

Of course, exposing an iPhone’s innards to the harsh light of day is something only fellow geeks would even consider, too.

Let this be a lesson, well, several lessons, to you all:

Always, always read the reviews before you buy online,
Be absolutely certain the problem isn’t lint before replacing your iPhone’s charging port, and
Amazon user DullJack is a gentleman and scholar deserving of the gratitude and respect of fellow geeks everywhere.

Mar 28, 2013 ∞

Amazon acquiring Goodreads

Makes sense.

Jan 10, 2013 ∞

Law and the Multiverse analyzes 'The Hobbit' Contract

Law and the Multiverse analyzes ‘The Hobbit’ Contract

I love several things about this:

This is only the first in an ongoing series, with three other parts as of the moment I published this post.
You can buy the contract from Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit on Amazon.
James Daily, who wrote the post to which I link above, bought that prop contract from Amazon and used it in the creation of the article series.

Wonderfully fun stuff!

Dec 26, 2012 ∞

Netflix via Amazon

This is interesting: Netflix delivers its streaming option via one of Amazon’s cloud storage and content distribution networks. I try to avoid summarizing other peoples’ work, but the other interesting bit here is that Amazon’s in-house streaming video service saw no interruption.

If I was a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I’d throw around phrases like “net neutrality concerns” right about now. Is Amazon prioritizing their own content over the content of competitors whose content they’re contracted to deliver?

Oct 23, 2012 ∞

Amazon outage takes out Reddit, Foursquare, Heroku

Lee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica:

These kinds of outages are a jarring reminder of the true nature of “the cloud”—it’s still just servers in data centers.

Amazon’s market power in ebooks leads to some questionable behavior, as well as some anti-competitive business practices.

Now it is becoming increasingly clear that reliance on Amazon by some of the internet’s most popular services could be a liability. Their cloud hosting services, which, to be fair, are well known for affordability and reliability, look like an attractive single point of failure for the things we use on the internet every day.

Oct 22, 2012 ∞

Amazon's "phantom" 20% VAT for UK ebook sales

Amazon’s “phantom” 20% VAT for UK ebook sales

Ian Griffiths and Dan Milmo of The Guardian, quoting ” a contract seen by the Guardian,” presumably between Amazon and one of its UK publishing “partners”:

If the base price exceeds the base price … provided to a similar service then … the base price hereunder will be deemed to be equal to such lower price, effective as of the date such lower price comes into effect.

That’s a good deal, especially coupled with the recent ebooks settlement.

The US antitrust regime is focused on protecting consumer interests. That means that as long as Amazon’s book selection continues to rise and their prices continue to fall, they’re unlikely to see any problems on the competition law front.

That’s probably not good for consumers in the long-run, especially given Amazon’s DRM and control over your devices and library. I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Amazon will face some antitrust scrutiny of its own in the next year.

Sep 27, 2012 ∞

Kindle Library Bulk Delete

I want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this problem.

I, like them, needed to get rid of months of Instapaper cruft. This bookmarklet did the trick. Instapaper’s Kindle integration is wonderful, but I wish Amazon would let us auto-delete recurring content.

Sep 25, 2012 ∞

Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, Android

Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:

This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.

I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.

But that’s not the only angle here, is it?

I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:

How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?

Sep 19, 2012 ∞

Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience

Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:

Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.

Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.

Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.

That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.

Sep 12, 2012 ∞

Gruber on "Amazon's Play"

Gruber on “Amazon’s Play”

John Gruber writes one of the most respected and prolific tech blogs on the web, Daring Fireball. Some people deride him as a blindly-worshipful Apple fanboy who delights in pointing out the failed attempts of other companies to copy Apple’s products and strategy.

I don’t agree with those people.

This article by Mr. Gruber is a great example of his willingness to praise true innovation. Amazon has taken inspiration not from Apple’s hardware or software design, but from their approach to product development.

Place the delight of your customers first and the device and multimedia sales will follow. Put another way, Amazon, like Apple, operates on the premise that putting customer experience first is the best way to put corporate success first.

Kindle Fire HD 8.9: how the new Kindle tablet compares with the competition

Amazon increased the power and range of its Kindle offerings and achieved impressively-low pricing across the board. Again.

I’m 100% certain someone I know will get one of the newly-announced devices, maybe even before the holidays, and I can’t wait to have a look.

The danger of covertly-altered ebooks

"Philip," writing at his blog Ocracoke Island Journal about the ebook edition of War and Peace he bought on his Nook (emphasis below is mine):

As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern….”

…

For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern….”

That absurd find-and-replace decision was apparently applied to every instance of “kindle” throughout the ebook.

The publisher of this particular edition is hilariously called Superior Formatting Publishing. Their website is a Wordpress installation. That’s fine for weblogs of note, like this one, but unless you’ve hired a solid designer and/or developer, Wordpress probably won’t cut it for a publishing website.

The company fumbles even worse in basing the majority of the site’s content on Amazon API calls. Amazon has presumably updated something in their API since Superior Formatting Publishing (really, two -ing words in a row?) because most of the site says only “Whoops, looks like there was a problem get the book data from Amazon. Please try again in a moment” or simply “Amazon API Error.”

"Philip" makes the point that "the ease with which anyone can commit such jackassetry with an ebook and a simple, stupid "find and replace" function. He says:

It makes one wary of the integrity of any digital version of not only War and Peace…but any e-book.’

He’s right. Sure, people could always publish altered versions of a text in the past, but it’s far easier to do with digital content than the paper stuff. This instance involves what looks like a very low-budget “publisher,” but there are many such publishers out there, often with cut-rate prices.

I wonder how many others are find-and-replacing classic works of literature. Are all such changes merely stupid, like changing “kindle” to “Nook” in the hopes (I assume) of avoiding some automated removal from the Nook store? Or are there people out there making the dangerous, destructive changes about which Philip opines?

Apple still faces legal action from multiple angles on the ebook front, and most big publishers and sellers know that this is still a nascent market.

But that’s what worries me: will the continued growth of the legitimate ebook publishing market mean the continued growth of D-list wannabes like Superior Formatting Publishing? How can we address the potential for the sale of covertly-altered literature? Is it something for the Federal Trade Commission to look into, as they did with blogger endorsements?

I’m always wary of increased government regulation as long as there’s a way for the market to take care of itself, but I fear there may always be a market for dirt-cheap ebook editions of literary works, sold with or without the right authorization (public domain, licensing, etc.), and with or without the text as it was actually written by the author.

We should all be careful and discerning about which publishers we go to for ebook editions of the books we want to buy.

Hat -tip to Professor Zittrain, on whose site I first read about this

joeross.me