They are refunding for them. But in my opinion, you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has.
Amazon has cancelled lots of consumer stuff in the past (the Alexa buttons or whatever they were) but cancelling business-facing things is new. Businesses are much more cancellation averse than forgetful consumers have proven to be.
In fairness to Amazon, my understanding is that existing Dash buttons haven't been sunset, they just stopped selling them. The one consumer device that I do know that they bricked was the Dash Wand, which was like a handheld Dash Button but you ordered with voice (like Alexa) or barcode. I think very few people actually had one, though.
This exists as wifi-connected scales with Bottomless[1].
My gut reaction is that Bottomless is laughably absurd, an IoT device and middleman in search of a problem. But I’m trying to analyze it fairly. In what circumstance is this better than a normal product subscription that allows skips?
Anyone actually used it or know someone that uses it loyally?
I'm way too cheap to buy something like that myself, but I see a clear value proposition. Firstly, if your use rate is variable (maybe you bake only sporadically), that breaks any regular subscription. Secondly, it removes the human error of possibly failing to cancel the subscription, or failing to order.
That is basically the business model of Subscribe and Save without having to build a product. They give you a discount because they bank on you ordering more often than you typically do.
I still remember the day that AT&T came out and discounted all Fire phones to 99 cents on a zero-term contract for postpaid customers.
The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful.
AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.
You could for a while get a Fire Phone for something like $100, which included a year Prime subscription. That meant that you were paying around $20 for a phone and what were actually some pretty good pack-in wired earbuds at a time when wireless earbuds weren't a thing. I did this, and the phone was serviceable once you rooted it, so long as you remembered the price you paid for it.
This is practically the same management that produced Fire Phone. It's actually quite something. This division of Amazon management produced Fire Phone, was forgiven and produced Alexa to superficial success so were allowed to then produce this. When now we know that all these projects were huge money trash fires.
Sorry, but the team that produced Alexa (& Echo) were completely separate from the team that produced the Fire Phone. There were distinct product teams, design teams, software engineering teams, hardware teams, and GM-equivalents (Amazon didn't really call people GM so much in those days.)
(Unless you're talking about the entirety of Dave Limp's organization, which produced a lot of things...)
I can only make informed guesses. My feeling is the phone was shipped as a contractual obligation on both sides. Think the Microsoft kin phone and Verizon as an analog.
Shipping a 1366 by potato screen phone with an outdated version of Android, and an app store that was missing most apps.
AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.
They did court apps with AWS credits and things (at least they did for the one I was working on). I think they didn't realize (or plan for) the part where apps had dependencies on other Googley stuff. Can't just push the apk to Amazon too, if Amazon doesn't have a workalike maps api, etc.
When the Fire phone was on Fire sale, it was a pretty good value for users though. The launcher was weird, but you could smuggle Google Play store on it, and it had a good processor.
I think that's actually worse. It's several disparate teams failing in similar ways. It makes Amazon looknfoolosh with their hiring process and "principles".
Amazon can never keep people long enough to actually ship a video game.
No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset.
It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.
> you only get a couple of these un-launches before you get a reputation like Google has.
That's just not true. Companies cancel things all the time. Obviously these weren't exactly selling well -- what else is a company supposed to do?
The fact that literally no other company has the reputation for cancelling things that Google has, should tell you that their reputation is something very specific to Google, for whatever reason.
These days, a lot of products rely on talking to servers in the cloud for functionality. These products very often become unusable when a product is canceled because they lose a great deal of functionality. Only products which have sold well seem to have those servers remain operational for an extended time period beyond when sales end.
> on the top of it Prime is not even worth it anymore.
I had been thinking about cancelling, when something happened that made me disappointed in their customer service, something that used to be top of the line for Amazon. Didn’t even get offered a free month of Prime for their fuckup. Made the decision easy.
But since then, they’ve been incessant, trying to get me to buy Prime again on literally every order. At least now it’s up to 1 free month if I come back, at first they tried 1 free week. I know, I know, "ads always and forever work", and if I say anything else I’m some arrogant idiot, but this is once again advertising that leaves a sour taste in my mouth and is certainly something I remember.
They probably resulted in too many returns/complaints over price, I suspect. I use 'subscribe & save', but I necessarily monitor & adjust it, otherwise it is absolutely not '& save'. Or it is, but only relative to the Amazon non-subscription price at that time, from that seller, with absolutely no guarantee it's reasonable.
For me it's just a way to get 15% off stuff that isn't too time-sensitive. Running a little low, stock up. Same way people use Costco or similar if there's one convenient I suppose.
(Tangential, but would be great if you could subscribe on a price basis: send me two of these with my S&S order if the price is below £12.34 or whatever (and not otherwise).)
Yeah I find S&S very odd. You'd think Amazon would know how to do this properly with their logistical and pricing prowess, but the price swings all over the place (sometimes to ludicrous levels) and items are often out of stock/backordered for weeks.
It reminds me of Uber's prebook a taxi, which (may have changed), doesn't prebook anything and if there aren't any ubers when you booked you are out of luck.
I used Uber's schedule thing recently and I was really worried about it because it sat unfilled for a week, but they assigned a driver a week before. I'd use it again. I'm pretty far outside the normal Uber area (which is why I booked so far in advance) so the driver has to travel 1.5 hrs without a fare to pick me up, but they told me it works out pretty even in the end.
I’ve had good luck with subscribe and save in the UK. It seems to take the lowest recent price for each product, so there haven’t been many times I was surprised by a high price - but a lot of times that I was pleased with a low price!
The trick is to go in and review the order before it’s due to ship (you get an email reminder) and cancel/substitute/defer any items you don’t need or that are priced too high.
Occasionally I’ve also noticed items that are showing out of stock on the product page, but they still managed to find stock for my S&S order.
I am also in the UK (person who you replied to replied to) - your second paragraph is exactly what I mean. It's fine, it's good, but it's not set it and forget it, it's plan a bigger order, and check it nearer the time.
It definitely doesn't 'take the lowest recent price', it doesn't even claim to, it gives you whatever discount (either 0/5 or 5/15 percent depending the product, and less/more than five items respectively) against the exact product listing and exact seller for that listing that you set it up against. I've cancelled/skipped them and ordered the same literal product (maybe a different listing) cheaper as a one-off order on numerous occasions. Nevermind all the ones I have set up that are basically just 'salt' or whatever and I don't care about the brand, the cheapest brand can vary a lot and if you're not careful you can end up subscribed to one that happens to go maliciously expensive.
I certainly make sure I get the 15% S&S discount. But I've also noticed that sometimes even the base price (before the discount) shows lower than the current price on the product page. Maybe I've just gotten lucky and the price was lower at the time my S&S was processed, which tends to be a week or more before it ships. What happens if the price on an item drops during that window between when the order is processed and the ship date?
For me it's not so much about price, but availability. I have a couple things that I use at both very consistent rates and aren't available locally. It's about not running out without having to consciously think about it.
Yeah I can’t see myself every subscribing for the discount or something, but it has a lot of value as exactly that.
The coffee I like isn’t available anywhere near me. And even if it was, it’s just one more thing to stay on top of because I damn sure don’t want to run out.
I go through it consistently enough that I just haven’t had to think about coffee in probably two years. Every once in a while I open my door and some has appeared and that’s exactly when I realize I was running low.
There are several other advantages with subscribe & save:
1. You get a 15% discount.
2. Everything arrives in one shipment, with multiple items in the same box, saving on packaging.
3. It saves time to have the products you use regularly pre-loaded into the Amazon order (I can't think of an alternative way to do a "one click purchase" of multiple items, and its easier to remove items from a pre-filled order than to have to search for them and add them).
4. As mentioned elsewhere, Amazon seems to try to make sure there is stock available for subscribe & save customers, reserving stock even if it's showing as sold out on the product page.
Yeah I subscribe and save to melatonin gummies and I got an email in May saying they’ve “paused” my subscription until October because they’re afraid that the gummies will melt during shipment. Like how is that not a predictable problem? Summer is hot.
I got a Kraft mac & cheese one as a joke and had it on my desk at work. Every now and then someone would walk past and press it. Went straight to the local food bank.
For anyone wondering, these were called the Dash buttons.
I have a few from ~2016 that I was playing with a couple months ago. You have to block them from connecting to amazon servers... I got them working and started but didn't finish tying them into a local flask server.
That's when the Echo device came out, was it able to order products from release?
Scrolling through functionality on wikipedia [0] almost makes it sound as though it doesn't even do that now. There's just a reference to a 2019 meeting about people not using it to order products.
Dash came out well before alexa and several years iirc before alexa ordering. Why do I know? I did on dash reviews a few months before dash went live (hardware was in warehouses waiting to ship). 8 months later I moved to a different team and 6 months after that my old team all left what they were doing and started building ordering via alexa.
To a consumer it's fine. For a business the amount of money spent is only one part of the equation. Some places will have spent significant time both in the procurement process and setting this thing up. Time that can be translated to opportunity cost.
As the person proposing such purchases you want to be able to show successes. Amazon just bricking it means you don't have much to show for, probably burnt political capital for nothing to get these, and if anyone was opposed to getting these they are now proven right.
Both on the organizational and individual level these kinds of things are far more impactful in business products than in a hobbyist product
Is it? Let’s say I buy a Foo rather than a Bar because it brings better value for money. A few months later, the device is bricked, and I get my money back, but Bar doesn’t sell my 2nd choice anymore or it got more expensive.
Even if it isn’t, I may have made additional investments in time (e.g. learning how to operate it) or money (e.g. buying an longer charging cable) that I won’t get back.
Definitely not ok with Comsumer products either, especially once they are in this price range.
It's basically in the range of an expensive laptop, fancy fridge + dishwasher, big couch, etc... Something that might have taken multiple weekends to shop for and maybe even a day off work to get delivered, possibly followed by months of personalization for an electronics product like a laptop.
I think basically any consumer buying something like this thinks of it as an expensive toy, not a permanent investment in their lifestyle. What would the Bar even be to the Astro's Foo?
It's also not necessarily super easy to refund money to a business. I know that accounts receivable at my company is a serious pain in the ass, and it's not a given that refunds on anything purchased via PO are gonna be easy or quick. And of course there are restrictions on how you can purchase things that might easily have required these to be bought via PO (rather than corporate CC).
If you are a business owner who bought one of these and happy with the device would you be “all good” with a refund?
There are costs associated with fielding new tech. At the minimum now people have to evaluate and install some new tech/service. Possibly you are now scrambling around to get a new guard service which can keep your property secure, perhaps at an elevated rate. At the worst your property is going to be burglarised because of the lack of security coverage.
This sucks. It damages Amazon’s reputation a tiny little bit. Every time anyone evaluates some tech or service they think about “will this thing go away one day and leave me in the lurch”? Doing this just increased the estimated probability of Amazon flaking out on you just a tiny bit. That means the next time they are selling something their own brand they will have just a tiny bit harder time to convince companies to be the early adopters. This kind of damage is cumulative in a non-linear way. And reputation is one of those things which are very hard to restore once you have ruined it.
There is nothing “all good” about it. At best this is an “on balance of costs and benefits this course of action was less damaging for Amazon than the alternatives”.
> After all, they know only 30 people in the entire US bought the thing
Do you have a source for that?
> number for illustration
What do you mean by that? What is it illustrating?
Is this some post-truth thing where you make up something and then provide a weird disclaimer to let people know that you just made up a thing out of thin air? If so, it ain’t cool.
I am doubtful that people bought these to park their money in it so as long they get back the money 'it is all good'. Whatever the vague use of this was that failed so bad those purchased it for a purpose that needs to be fulfilled, again. Waste of efforts, have to try again.
The root comment was not about money but reputation. How confidently can someone buy something from Amazon to use if a 'sorry, I changed my mind, give it back and solve your task some other way, I am out of here!' is hanging over the head.
They could of also supported it for another 2 or 3 months, to get to a full year( most electronics are only warrantied for a year), and then bricked them without a refund.
It's the risk of buying experimental tech. If you don't want this to happen you can wait until it's an established product.
It’s not “all good”. Businesses have to invest in change, employee time is expensive, refunding equipment doesn’t refund the cost of resources put into the project and resources required to change after the plug is pulled.
It's not all good just because you refund someone. You're also ending something they bought to fulfill a purpose. Making every device require a specific back end to continue working and making them unusable if the manufacturer no longer wants to provide that back end should be illegal. They should have to open the devices up. This practice creates so much unnecessary e-waste.
I've actually seen one of these in person (the guy had it for free because he knew someone at Amazon working on the personal dogfood version).
I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was actually for, and neither could he, as it was basically solely a party trick for him. They don't even vacuum floors like a Roomba does!
The linked article talks about security patrols or whatever, but simply installing security cameras is cheaper and better. A robot obviously rolling along the floor is easy to avoid or to disable.
I also know someone at Amazon who “dogfooded” one! I saw one, single, semi-valid use case, which is that it was a decent way to intermittently check up on your pets without setting up multiple cameras… but obviously not worth it at nearly $3,000 with tax.
Minor nitpick, I've just come back from a multilevel house with stairs and ways to roll to|from any room; wide doorways, ramps, spiral outside groundwork, screw-drive elevator.
Home build by an engineer | farmer - most houses hereabouts are single level, this one is cut into a sloping block and the design is as much about wheeling a fridge anyway as it is wheelchairs - the outside steel shed is fully drive through on the level .. and then there's a drop to a lesser driveway so that stuff can be rolled directly onto a trayback (loading bay).
It's well thought out and practical, the own builder did the shed first and lived on site for two years with earth moving gear (owner | contractor) digging out big rocks, placing them, recessing walls into hillside, building out steel frame, etc.
I personally could see a use for a mobile security camera, but it needs to be more agile and capable than basically a camera on a table lamp with wheels. Give me a robot dog that can get throughout my house when I'm away and I'd get one. Give it teeth and claws and I'm buying 20.
Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud?
Maybe it’s cost prohibitive to produce something like this robot at tiny scale, but it seems like the best way to develop would be to identify a few partner businesses, super serve them well and then sell to general public.
Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody [1].
To be fair, maybe that’s what they are doing with their home product. And to be doubly fair, building a subscription billing product is far more straightforward than introducing a new category.
>Working backwards, customer centricity, etc. etc. from their principles and they couldn’t figure out this was going to be a dud?
As someone who worked inside Amazon, the LPs and particular "customer obsession" are quite a lot more malleable than they might appear. For example, a PM might pitch "ads by default in Prime Video" as quote-unquote customer obsessed because ads inform customers about products that they could use.
I just yesterday logged into Prime video after not having used it for a while and saw that they added ads. I went straight to Amazon and cancelled my prime subscription.
ex-AWS here. No, plenty of projects get built and released without a truly rigorous working backwards process. PRFAQs (working backwards document) do get written, but wouldn't say PMs and GMs always have the highest bar for being evidence driven.
> Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody
They’re just using the standard startup playbook here
This type of thing is bad for the internal innovator who must expend political capital to get their organization to try new things. “Hey boss, Amazon has this new thing we should try.”
Burn those people a few times and they’re gone forever.
Bad for innovative product engineers at companies like Amazon, too. Pretty demoralising to have your product canned on a whim after years of effort to bring it to release. Maybe it’s better to just work on boring things, don’t stick your neck out…
That's certainly been the atmosphere here lately. The messaging used to be "work on the big ideas, we'll take care of you if the product fails" Amazon would shutter projects and move people around. The past few years though, they just lay everyone off in that project.
It has a chilling affect to work new ideas when you know the next round of cost cutting could take your job
Yep. It's unwise to embark on new ventures half-heartedly, without thinking ahead to their market potential, or without derisking them by experimenting before going into production, only to then yank the rug out from the team so quickly. It's Google-like dilettancy, or like Meta's Portal and Workplace.
Exchange (on-prem) and MS Office (on your PC, not in browser) are due to get the green curtain, single shot heard treatment in a couple of years time. Outlook is already going oddly Electron flavoured.
I think you may mean king of (y)our enterprise, not in a constitutional monarchy way but the feudal form. Note how hard it is to make One Drive go away permanently on Windows. You can't, unless you nobble Windows updates and that is not too bright an idea.
1. You can get rid of OneDrive by uninstalling it.
2. You seem to be implying that MS will get rid of its desktop applications. This seems unlikely give that the desktop applications work well and are popular. Do you have any proof that they will be replaced.
3. You also claim that releasing a new version of Outlook somehow is equivalent to canceling it or ruining it. I switched to the new version and it worked fine. I actually liked how the user interface was simplified.
It's fine to prefer other products. That being said, spreading FUD is really not helpful.
Do you have any proof about MS Office desktop apps being cancelled? I have not heard about that. Also, the new Outlook works fine.
Microsoft is literally launching a new version of on-prem Exchange next year after a major investment in rearchitecting a large portion of its internal code and changing the licensing model to suit.
Skype for Business has very little to do with Skype the consumer application. Skype for Business used to be called Lync. It's a messaging, and communication application for business users. It was replaced by MS Teams.
Discontinuing the product is one thing, but intentionally bricking the existing ones (and leaving it up to the former owners to dispose of the resulting e-waste) seems uncalled for to me.
These devices are heavily dependent on software running on servers in Amazon's cloud. They're being bricked only because those servers are being turned off because continuing to maintain the server software would be expensive and not to Amazon's gain.
I used to pay for their stuff, but I have moved to Seafile and Fastmail. Only google product I still use is YouTube, everything else has been replaced and I don't consider new Google products anymore.
Indeed. I recently inherited a bunch of Amazon stock, and I sold it a few days ago because I just don't have much confidence in the way Amazon operates. Decisions like these (releasing products that are not profitable, bricking products shortly after release, etc.) make me think that the company is being poorly managed.
I wonder how much we're rushing to defend the three businesses that bought a total of 10 of them, most of them connected to Amazon anyhow, or some similar number.
I have a hard time imagining Amazon is so much as shutting down 1000 devices here.
An invite only product with extremely meager sales realized to have been about as worthwhile as a brick being fully refunded with $300 extra plus cost of recycling covered may not be a hacker's utopia but seems like a pretty good option to me. Much better than imagining any of these businesses were going to hack the failed gear into something useful instead.
Seems it requires cloud services, so once Amazon shuts these down it’s as good as bricked. Otherwise they have to run the cloud forever, or reprogram them not to need cloud.
I had a cat feeder that required cloud, and when that company went out of business I had a brick and no refund. (Yeah I was crazy to buy the thing, but I had my reasons and knew the risks.) That’s the risk with these cloudy devices.
It's always sad when a small startup like Amazon doesn't have the resources to keep a couple servers running and updated. If only some company invented some kind of service to make that kind of thing easier.
> and leaving it up to the former owners to dispose of the resulting e-waste
"Amazon's email to customers encourages owners to recycle Astro for Business through the Amazon Recycling Program, with Amazon covering associated costs."
> Per Amazon's emails, the company is still keen to release the home version of Astro
Maybe they find it easier to convince consumers to let amazon spy on them and their homes than it is to convince businesses to let amazon spy on what happens in the office, or maybe the data they were collecting from businesses doesn't seem like it's be as valuable to them as the data they'll collect by putting a mobile camera and microphone in households.
If someone sends me one of these dead units I'd be happy to work on creating OSS software to run it ... And perhaps it would be a great challenge for our FIRST robotics team during the off-season!
This is going to be the new norm from big tech firms. After the massive layoffs there's just no capacity left for these quixotic speculative products inside major tech companies. What remains of their labor force is focusing on their core business areas.
The last these bets is AI, which already has Wall Street recoiling at the cost.
Amazon could reduce this PR disaster by organising to give returned Astros to school programming clubs. Along with a way to hack the firmware, of course.
At this point sell-brick-refund is starting to sound like a capital-raising model. Get cash and customer data and maybe some other buy in and then return it after 1 year. Keep profits.
will the robots receive a self-destruct command (real bricking), or will required external APIs be shut down (effectively bricking, but with a possibility of third-party service resurrection) ?
This really ought not be allowed. If you take a product off the market and stop supporting it, you should release the code and support information to enable people who bought it to keep it viable. Subscription models and clever contractual arrangements are bullshit fig leaves for companies trying to have their cake and eat it too.
They have plans to release related products for the home.
So no, they shouldn't be obligated to release the code, because obviously that's code that may be greatly reused, and they don't exactly want to help out competitors (nor should they be obligated to).
Also, they're refunding the devices entirely (with an additional credit) and taking them back for recycling. So they seem to be doing 100% the right things here.
Oh no no no. Companies are supposed to be perfect and clairvoyant and never make a mistake. So it’s entirely reasonable to expect them to have no need for learning or fixing or reversing a decision.
My employer exists because one day Amazon didn’t feel like supporting their warehouse robot b2b anymore. I have a sense that they do this kind of thing to use companies as Guinea pigs. They experiment and then abandon the product and take the lessons elsewhere.
That was a shock in the warehousing industry. Many companies make equipment for automated warehouses, and those are long-term commitments for the buyer. To have a key supplier bought out by a competitor, and external customers then cut off was a new thing.
reminds me of the Amazon Cloud Cam product. I had over a hundred of those cameras on my rentals, and in one day there useless. Just like how Google is found to be doing this kind of behavior in the past, Amazon now too is the new brand not to trust with any long term investment.
Is anyone surprised? This part of Amazon has been setting money on fire for years. It hasn’t stopped the people involved from being rewarded though. Amazon employees complain about how the teams in this part of the company get essentially all the headcount or resources they request and build up giant teams that do busy work and get promoted. But they’ve failed to build even one sustainable business. For those who got promoted, this part doesn’t matter - they can just move teams or companies and keep their undeserved titles.
Not really. The typical SDE or SDM from these projects delivered a bunch of good, working software. The product managers might have a harder time proving that they did their job well; but there's really no penalty for an SDE who chooses to support a longshot effort.
That said, the idea that the davelimp organization is given carte blanche for headcount and resources is laughably inaccurate.
Amazon has cancelled lots of consumer stuff in the past (the Alexa buttons or whatever they were) but cancelling business-facing things is new. Businesses are much more cancellation averse than forgetful consumers have proven to be.
My gut reaction is that Bottomless is laughably absurd, an IoT device and middleman in search of a problem. But I’m trying to analyze it fairly. In what circumstance is this better than a normal product subscription that allows skips?
Anyone actually used it or know someone that uses it loyally?
1. https://www.bottomless.com/
The phone had only been out for a few weeks at the point, the sales and return numbers must have been awful.
AT&T tried really hard to push that product like they did with the Nokia Lumias, but with specs worse than a Samsung Galaxy S3, a crummy app store, ancient Android, and going head to head against the Galaxy S4 with a 1366 by potato screen it was a fools errand to launch that product.
(Unless you're talking about the entirety of Dave Limp's organization, which produced a lot of things...)
AT&T could only push that pile of crap so far, they really did have their sales teams push it hard though. Very hard to convince a customer to get a Fire phone rather than a Galaxy S4, or even an S3.
When the Fire phone was on Fire sale, it was a pretty good value for users though. The launcher was weird, but you could smuggle Google Play store on it, and it had a good processor.
No one involved trusts Amazon to actually employ them 2 years from now, thus Amazonians have an extremely short-term mindset.
It's not like they can't look across the lake to Bellevue and see Nintendo, Microsoft, Valve and others delivering consistently. The Amazon culture is just too toxic to allow this to actually grow into a popular product.
That's just not true. Companies cancel things all the time. Obviously these weren't exactly selling well -- what else is a company supposed to do?
The fact that literally no other company has the reputation for cancelling things that Google has, should tell you that their reputation is something very specific to Google, for whatever reason.
This is a cloud connected device so it seems like an entirely fair outcome.
If they didn't refund customers then I would be complaining too, but that's simply not the case here.
Given how niche of a product this was I'm not sure people are going to be really upset at this ...
I had been thinking about cancelling, when something happened that made me disappointed in their customer service, something that used to be top of the line for Amazon. Didn’t even get offered a free month of Prime for their fuckup. Made the decision easy.
But since then, they’ve been incessant, trying to get me to buy Prime again on literally every order. At least now it’s up to 1 free month if I come back, at first they tried 1 free week. I know, I know, "ads always and forever work", and if I say anything else I’m some arrogant idiot, but this is once again advertising that leaves a sour taste in my mouth and is certainly something I remember.
Out of garbage bags? Press the button. Out of dishwasher tabs? Press another button. Rinse aid? Same.
For me it's just a way to get 15% off stuff that isn't too time-sensitive. Running a little low, stock up. Same way people use Costco or similar if there's one convenient I suppose.
(Tangential, but would be great if you could subscribe on a price basis: send me two of these with my S&S order if the price is below £12.34 or whatever (and not otherwise).)
It reminds me of Uber's prebook a taxi, which (may have changed), doesn't prebook anything and if there aren't any ubers when you booked you are out of luck.
The trick is to go in and review the order before it’s due to ship (you get an email reminder) and cancel/substitute/defer any items you don’t need or that are priced too high.
Occasionally I’ve also noticed items that are showing out of stock on the product page, but they still managed to find stock for my S&S order.
It definitely doesn't 'take the lowest recent price', it doesn't even claim to, it gives you whatever discount (either 0/5 or 5/15 percent depending the product, and less/more than five items respectively) against the exact product listing and exact seller for that listing that you set it up against. I've cancelled/skipped them and ordered the same literal product (maybe a different listing) cheaper as a one-off order on numerous occasions. Nevermind all the ones I have set up that are basically just 'salt' or whatever and I don't care about the brand, the cheapest brand can vary a lot and if you're not careful you can end up subscribed to one that happens to go maliciously expensive.
The coffee I like isn’t available anywhere near me. And even if it was, it’s just one more thing to stay on top of because I damn sure don’t want to run out.
I go through it consistently enough that I just haven’t had to think about coffee in probably two years. Every once in a while I open my door and some has appeared and that’s exactly when I realize I was running low.
That basically defeats any advantage of a subscription. You might as well just have a bookmark calendar event that leads to the one-click purchase.
I imagine they prioritized the short-term profits of a just-in-time middleman.
It IS a predictable problem. And they predicted it, and did something about it.
If you live in a super hot location you can’t always get stuff shipped year round.
I’d prefer that to dealing with the return and refund process.
I have a few from ~2016 that I was playing with a couple months ago. You have to block them from connecting to amazon servers... I got them working and started but didn't finish tying them into a local flask server.
Seems kind of redundant when you can just “hey Alexa, order garbage bags”.
They both came out approximately at the same time, 2014-2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash
Scrolling through functionality on wikipedia [0] almost makes it sound as though it doesn't even do that now. There's just a reference to a 2019 meeting about people not using it to order products.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Alexa
Would of been nice for them to open source the SDK too.
As the person proposing such purchases you want to be able to show successes. Amazon just bricking it means you don't have much to show for, probably burnt political capital for nothing to get these, and if anyone was opposed to getting these they are now proven right.
Both on the organizational and individual level these kinds of things are far more impactful in business products than in a hobbyist product
Is it? Let’s say I buy a Foo rather than a Bar because it brings better value for money. A few months later, the device is bricked, and I get my money back, but Bar doesn’t sell my 2nd choice anymore or it got more expensive.
Even if it isn’t, I may have made additional investments in time (e.g. learning how to operate it) or money (e.g. buying an longer charging cable) that I won’t get back.
It's basically in the range of an expensive laptop, fancy fridge + dishwasher, big couch, etc... Something that might have taken multiple weekends to shop for and maybe even a day off work to get delivered, possibly followed by months of personalization for an electronics product like a laptop.
Have fun doing accounting for those credits.
Very bad look.
If you are a business owner who bought one of these and happy with the device would you be “all good” with a refund?
There are costs associated with fielding new tech. At the minimum now people have to evaluate and install some new tech/service. Possibly you are now scrambling around to get a new guard service which can keep your property secure, perhaps at an elevated rate. At the worst your property is going to be burglarised because of the lack of security coverage.
This sucks. It damages Amazon’s reputation a tiny little bit. Every time anyone evaluates some tech or service they think about “will this thing go away one day and leave me in the lurch”? Doing this just increased the estimated probability of Amazon flaking out on you just a tiny bit. That means the next time they are selling something their own brand they will have just a tiny bit harder time to convince companies to be the early adopters. This kind of damage is cumulative in a non-linear way. And reputation is one of those things which are very hard to restore once you have ruined it.
There is nothing “all good” about it. At best this is an “on balance of costs and benefits this course of action was less damaging for Amazon than the alternatives”.
Without a doubt.
> After all, they know only 30 people in the entire US bought the thing
Do you have a source for that?
> number for illustration
What do you mean by that? What is it illustrating?
Is this some post-truth thing where you make up something and then provide a weird disclaimer to let people know that you just made up a thing out of thin air? If so, it ain’t cool.
Instead, they went with an abitrary low number and declared it to be arbitrary.
const ILLUSTRATIVE_LOW_SALES = 30
Seems fine to me.
The root comment was not about money but reputation. How confidently can someone buy something from Amazon to use if a 'sorry, I changed my mind, give it back and solve your task some other way, I am out of here!' is hanging over the head.
It's the risk of buying experimental tech. If you don't want this to happen you can wait until it's an established product.
It was clearly sold as a trial run and refunded but I haven't found a replacement that works as seamlessly.
I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was actually for, and neither could he, as it was basically solely a party trick for him. They don't even vacuum floors like a Roomba does!
The linked article talks about security patrols or whatever, but simply installing security cameras is cheaper and better. A robot obviously rolling along the floor is easy to avoid or to disable.
Minor nitpick, I've just come back from a multilevel house with stairs and ways to roll to|from any room; wide doorways, ramps, spiral outside groundwork, screw-drive elevator.
It's well thought out and practical, the own builder did the shed first and lived on site for two years with earth moving gear (owner | contractor) digging out big rocks, placing them, recessing walls into hillside, building out steel frame, etc.
That would give me pause after things like swatting... offline device maybe, but on the internet, just to end up on Shodan? Nah
What is it you say you do here?
Maybe it’s cost prohibitive to produce something like this robot at tiny scale, but it seems like the best way to develop would be to identify a few partner businesses, super serve them well and then sell to general public.
Stripe is famous for developing products that way. E.g. stripe subscriptions were built in concert with Atlasian and other companies, then released to everybody [1].
To be fair, maybe that’s what they are doing with their home product. And to be doubly fair, building a subscription billing product is far more straightforward than introducing a new category.
[1] https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-culture-of-excellen...
As someone who worked inside Amazon, the LPs and particular "customer obsession" are quite a lot more malleable than they might appear. For example, a PM might pitch "ads by default in Prime Video" as quote-unquote customer obsessed because ads inform customers about products that they could use.
Just a hypothetical scenario of course.
They’re just using the standard startup playbook here
Burn those people a few times and they’re gone forever.
It has a chilling affect to work new ideas when you know the next round of cost cutting could take your job
https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
Skype for Business is still supported!
I spent a year learning silverlight and XAML, so I might sound a bit bitter...
I think you may mean king of (y)our enterprise, not in a constitutional monarchy way but the feudal form. Note how hard it is to make One Drive go away permanently on Windows. You can't, unless you nobble Windows updates and that is not too bright an idea.
1. You can get rid of OneDrive by uninstalling it.
2. You seem to be implying that MS will get rid of its desktop applications. This seems unlikely give that the desktop applications work well and are popular. Do you have any proof that they will be replaced.
3. You also claim that releasing a new version of Outlook somehow is equivalent to canceling it or ruining it. I switched to the new version and it worked fine. I actually liked how the user interface was simplified.
It's fine to prefer other products. That being said, spreading FUD is really not helpful.
Do you have any proof about MS Office desktop apps being cancelled? I have not heard about that. Also, the new Outlook works fine.
Because it is data mining source!
google voice, you can still even get under 24h support replies! From freaking google! An actual support email reply, with a first name basis message!
It's awesome and scary, Like having a bear waking you up while camping.
And I guess they sold so few that this just made more sense to refund everyone than keeping maintaining the servers.
Google shuts stuff down left and right and nobody seems to be leaving.
I don't think you're right about that
I used to pay for their stuff, but I have moved to Seafile and Fastmail. Only google product I still use is YouTube, everything else has been replaced and I don't consider new Google products anymore.
I have a hard time imagining Amazon is so much as shutting down 1000 devices here.
I had a cat feeder that required cloud, and when that company went out of business I had a brick and no refund. (Yeah I was crazy to buy the thing, but I had my reasons and knew the risks.) That’s the risk with these cloudy devices.
"Amazon's email to customers encourages owners to recycle Astro for Business through the Amazon Recycling Program, with Amazon covering associated costs."
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/20/23415167/amazon-glow-sup...
Maybe they find it easier to convince consumers to let amazon spy on them and their homes than it is to convince businesses to let amazon spy on what happens in the office, or maybe the data they were collecting from businesses doesn't seem like it's be as valuable to them as the data they'll collect by putting a mobile camera and microphone in households.
The last these bets is AI, which already has Wall Street recoiling at the cost.
please, tell me someone had an armed response Astro video somewhere
Amazon have googled Astro robots.
will the robots receive a self-destruct command (real bricking), or will required external APIs be shut down (effectively bricking, but with a possibility of third-party service resurrection) ?
So no, they shouldn't be obligated to release the code, because obviously that's code that may be greatly reused, and they don't exactly want to help out competitors (nor should they be obligated to).
Also, they're refunding the devices entirely (with an additional credit) and taking them back for recycling. So they seem to be doing 100% the right things here.
Amazon is doing just that (and giving them an Amazon credit on top of the refund).
It's entirely common to pivot from non-product-market-fit to product-market-fit. That's what companies are supposed to do.
/s
That was a shock in the warehousing industry. Many companies make equipment for automated warehouses, and those are long-term commitments for the buyer. To have a key supplier bought out by a competitor, and external customers then cut off was a new thing.
That said, the idea that the davelimp organization is given carte blanche for headcount and resources is laughably inaccurate.