Amazonfail
I’m giving Amazon a day or two to get their arse in gear and explain what’s up before I pay my web dudes to take down their banner/link. But simply saying it was a glitch isn’t exactly what I’d call a full mea culpa. This was either:
A. A soon-to-be-ex middle manager’s “executive” decision.
B. A fundamentalist Easter egg.
C. All of the above.
I’d expect that Bezos will get ahead of this issue quickly with a public statement, but power and wealth does funny things to people’s heads/sense of accountability, so who knows? It’s amazing how a digital powerhouse is acting like a bunch of bricks-and-mortars morons.
Tags: amazonfail
April 14th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
There’s a little-used economic theory which explains much monopolistic behavior, and I think it applies here.
1) Being a large player mitigates your risk.
2) Because you have less risk, you are more apt to take chances.
3) Less risk = more chances=> shoddy work, decisions that are poorly executed or not thought through very carefully => epic failures.
This neatly explains the banking crisis as well as the current Amazon silliness. The fact is, there was almost certainly someone at Amazon screaming “People will hate this and we’ll get negative PR,” but they were probably ignored because the decision-makers reasoned (rightly) that they were “too big to fail.”
Thanks for making me line out my reasoning. Now back to my own blog.
April 15th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Is your next novel going to be out for the Kindle? I pre-ordered it on Amazon but I have a Kindle 2 and I thought I might get it for the Kindle instead…
April 16th, 2009 at 10:33 am
@ Melinda- agreed. Combine that with lot of the stuff about Amazon’s distributed architecture that’s now coming out, and you’ve got the formula for a real PR/logistical clusterfuck.
@ Al: I gotta assume the answer’s yes, as MIRRORED HEAVENS was available on Kindle. Let me doublecheck with the editor though.