> Until Amazon starts coming at this with the primary goal of producing a greater, better phone - and the goal of selling more Amazon content a distant second - they will keep failing.
The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship you one. That sort of thing isn't the problem because it's actually useful.
As an example of what they're doing wrong, Amazon is charging the same 30% in their app store as Apple and Google. They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats. That would get more apps in their store, get all the app developers promoting their devices and put pressure on Apple and Google to charge lower rates to anyone including Amazon who wants to sell content to people locked into the competing app stores. Their competitors look like profiteers if they don't respond and lose revenue if they do.
They're trying to enter a market and beat the incumbents at their own game when they could be making them play Amazon's game instead.
The strange thing is that they would have succeeded if they had just adopted their normal strategy. It would be fine if a prominent feature of the phone was that you could take a picture of any barcode on anything and have Amazon ship you one. That sort of thing isn't the problem because it's actually useful.
As an example of what they're doing wrong, Amazon is charging the same 30% in their app store as Apple and Google. They should be charging 3%. Low margin is where Amazon eats. That would get more apps in their store, get all the app developers promoting their devices and put pressure on Apple and Google to charge lower rates to anyone including Amazon who wants to sell content to people locked into the competing app stores. Their competitors look like profiteers if they don't respond and lose revenue if they do.
They're trying to enter a market and beat the incumbents at their own game when they could be making them play Amazon's game instead.