Amazon

Big Pile Of Ship

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Wait, news analysis?

Yeah, we over here at Fan To Pro have been dreadful busy, moving, getting new jobs, sick of old jobs, sick period, etc.  So the news analysis has kind of declined – and we do dump interesting articles to Ye Olde Twittere Feede.

So we didn’t get in a lot of news analysis, which of course was because all the great news happened at once.  I think if I were to sum it up, Apple’s new operating system is based on the Penny Arcade kickstarter, which is run in Windows 8 by Amazon, which is crouching over the burning corpse of Best Buy.  Or something.  Oh, and RIM is a disaster, but we knew that.

But out of the news articles, and all the crazy, something stood out:

Amazon is pushing to make same-day service.

Sure, it doesn’t come as any surprise, but there’s some takeaways:

First, this is going to be a challenge to lots of local retailers and not-so-local retailers.  Let’s face it, when you can get it from Amazon, people tend to.

Second, what’s being missed here is that Amazon is probably going to develop some revolutionary storage and shipping technologies.  People will want to help it happen, look at it, copy it, etc.  If you’re into shipping tech, this is revolutionary.

But there’s one thing that’s being missed among the Amazon-will-crush-all and so forth.

Amazon also has their amazon storefronts and the like.  What the hell are they going to be able to do when they have this mass shipping/recieving system set up? What kind of service can they offer to others?

Think of what it can mean for small businesses.  Think of how many other small companies providing services like this they may crush.  Think of what it will do if they use this to try to help people ignore the fact they’re sort of undermining other businesses . . .

Imagine if Amazon faces limiting lawsuits?  They could scale back – but keep the shipping business as a business.  An amazing about of people use their EC2 cloud service.

So, no, there may be much more to this than simply crushing others.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach for professional and potentially professional geeks, fans, and otaku. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/

 

 

 

How Amazon’s Success Destroys Itself?

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Earlier, Serdar linked to an excellent article by Baldur Bjarnson (current winner of ‘The Most Viking Name Ever’ six years running) and his fascinating analysis of Amazon’s situation and what they (or someone else) should do.

Of course I say “read the article” but part of why you come here is hard-hitting analysis, deep insight, and guys making fun of people’s names.

His essential argument is that Amazon has a surprisingly weak position, margin issues, technical issues, and strengths with vulnerabilities.  The end result could be a market like the ever-dismalifying comics market in his opinion.  His arguments are pretty solid.

However his most fascinating argument is that Amazon’s integration could destroy it.  As bookstores disappear and less publications are seen, Amazon could end up catering to a specialist audience.  It’s sad to say, but people already aren’t reading enough books anyway (in my opinion), and I can see a case where e-Books end up having issues finding audience due to lack of awareness and competition that never existed before.

I’ve chewed over this idea as it seems to fit some other models – extraction models.  Amazon runs on pretty tight margins (if not “no margins” in some ways).  This could be seen like any extraction industry, or even as a flashback to the “getting eyeballs” from the pre dot-bomb day, neither of which are exactly encouraging metaphors.  There’s already plenty of competition in the form of open formats or even that clunky but beloved format PDF.

So after reading this article, here I sit, teetering on the abyss, and wondering if Amazon actually will turned out to have messed up.  Having been through many Comic Meltdowns, the metaphor sits in my mind uncomfortably – weird variants, cool promotions, hopeful indies, price arguments, and even a narrow channel (Diamond).

– Steven Savage

 

Further Thoughts on E-Publishing And Missing Out

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Serdar brought up the point that in a way, publishers brought the Amazon mess on themselves because they resisted e-book technology. I think he had a brilliant insight, and want to expand on it further.

Let’s take a look at the whole Kindle idea. In many ways it’s a bare-bones thing (at least before the Tablet), a black-and-white-display (however with cool e-Ink), simple delivery, basic formatting. The Kindle is impressive as a unified system, but except for that e-ink, it doesn’t seem that innovative, from file format to the menu

But what Amazon did is string the links together in a chain that worked. They pushed it, they stuck buy it, they evolved it. I myself used to think the Kindle sounded ridiculous, now I own one. The Nook sounded like a runner-up, and now I not only hear great things, I have a friend who can’t put her’s down.

The iPad? Yeah.  Some issues but the big lawsuit shows Apple was big enough to talk with . . .

Of course each “link” chain should be obvious, but the Publishers didn’t  follow that.

All those publishers had money. They had technology. They had allies in book chains. They had people talking about eBooks and playing with formats.

They didn’t do anything. They left it to Amazon and Apple and Barnes and Noble. The Publishers avoided or dodged, didn’t take risks, and by and large let everyone else into the mobile space.

An alliance of publishers could have rallied around ePub. It could have backed a new device. It could have done all sorts of things. It didn’t exist and it didn’t happen.

Now what? I’ve launched books on my own, and the only reason to have a publisher is the marketing advantage (and there’s several small and mids for that). So many are exploring e-books. EVERYONE has to be on Kindle, and B&N is coming from behind (which I need to address in my own books).

It’s going to get wild, isn’t it?  Maybe people thinking of working for traditional publishing need to be thinking outside the box . . .

– Steven Savage