Super Volatile

I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

Steve Yegge strikes back. In the aftermath of his unfortunate rant, this time he paints much more flattering picture of Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon Kindle is full of all sorts of amazing, delightful touches — the sort of thing you’d expect from an Apple product. For example, when you first take your Kindle out of its (gorgeous!) box, it boots right up knowing your name and logged into your account. This is actually out-Apple-ing Apple: it’s possible because Amazon not only controls the hardware and the software, but the entire distribution channel; they know exactly who is going to get each Kindle.

Amazon is getting close to Apple's level of user experience, sometimes even exceeding them. But it's not quite there yet in some areas.

All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

Ever wondered how Amazon has embraced a service-oriented architecture that works? Or why exactly Google has to fear Facebook and Amazon? This rant has it all and is an excellent read.

It was written by Steve Yegge and aimed only at people from Google, but got out accidentally with a big splash on the web. Yegge had been working for Amazon for six years before he moved to Google in 2005.

But the world has changed, and Google can’t seem to keep up. Amazon has become the polar opposite of Google, empowering every developer on the planet to make incredible technology. Want MapReduce? Amazon has you covered. Want to play with terabytes of data like it ain’t no thing? Check. Want to launch thousands of servers to handle a tough computation? Check, check, and check. Want to launch thousands of human brains to solve otherwise unassailable problems? No problem. Heck, want to simply send email to your users? They have that too.

Amazon embraced much more pragmatic and commercially-driven approach to technology than Google. While the latter company may seem more open, eventually it may lose the hearts of developers for its inability to successfully commercialize the results of its R&D, effectively reducing them to impractical toys.

But the key for Amazon is just how deeply integrated all of their services are. Amazon’s content store is always just one click away. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon’s Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon’s Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon’s Android Appstore.

The rumors and speculations were true and Amazon is about to release its own cheap, color tablet. That can turn so called “tablet market” to be little more than iPad's undisputed turf.

That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made. Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards? That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion. All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.

Behind the scenes of Amazon App Store.

Instead of buttons, the new Nook makes use of a black and white E-ink infrared touchscreen (not unlike the new Kobo e-reader announced yesterday), allowing users to simulate turning pages by touching the screen with their fingers. There's an on-screen keyboard for searching and making notes, but Lynch said not to worry about the typical lag that comes with slow E-ink screens—the Nook apparently shows 80 percent less screen "flashing" when turning pages or typing on the screen.

New Nook looks well! But I don't think it's about hardware anymore. Amazon will catch up sooner or later and they seem to be much more ahead when it comes to distribution. In ideal world I would have a freedom to choose a reading device and be able to access content from any publisher without hassle.

Yesterday, Amazon.com posted below-expectations earnings, thanks mostly to a $3 billion increase in expenses. In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains why his company continues to re-invest in technology.

Peak into Bezos' philosophy of running his company. While Facebook and Google dominate public imagination as the coolest tech companies right now, Amazon is no less cutting edge, if you think about it. Its infrastructure is, well, an amazing piece of technology.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing. As it stands now, Dropbox is a middleman between you and Amazon in terms of storage. The costs for 50GB / 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drives are half the price of Dropbox and have a better chance of staying that way. Amazon has mastered storage and Dropbox has mastered syncing. Let’s allocate funds to the right places for the right services.

Interesting idea. Regardless of how it will eventually work out, the days of omnipresent cloud storage are finally coming to the masses.

There are other reasons why the music industry will either push Amazon for new licenses or take the legal route, and their names rhyme with Schmapple and Croogle.

"If Amazon can launch its service with no licenses, then Apple and Google would be fools to get licenses because they'd be at a cost disadvantage," Robertson said. "If the labels do nothing, they're basically inviting Google and Apple to follow the same strategy."

Amazon launch Cloud Drive, new storage service accompanied by a streaming music player called Cloud Player, without settling it with record labels first. Bold move that will have interesting consequences.