Chris Espinosa is impressed by the Silk browser which will “capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users.”
Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
The main target of all this? No, not Apple:
Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.
Back in 2005, Amazon had a short-lived web service called “pheromone trail” that was precipitated on the idea that every webmaster would want to put a little Javascript tracking bug on their site that would allow everyone to see everyone else’s movements across the Internet. So far as I know, the only two sites to even install it were mine and another Amazon employee’s.
Having worked at Amazon I can speculate that the engineers who worked on this had absolutely no intention of doing anything as evil as the blogosphere is suggesting, but that the data will also hang around forever and then some manager might decide to monetize it after all. And you can be damned sure that the TOS will allow for the use of the data in that way anyway.
“they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service,”
Are the servers that this is going to run on powered by normal electricity, or phrases like “Google can suck it”? I hardly see this as a passive endeavor.
I think he’s right.
Your Daily Beast article didn’t even mention that they forked this away from Google and aren’t using the Google App Store and Google Android branding.
They are competing with Apple and Google, both. But Apple retains a claim to the higher end market. Meanwhile, this will obliterate the (official) Android tablet market.
The Fire is clearly compelling and competitive. Now the question is why on earth buy anything other than a Fire or an iPad?
It’s more than a little odd that you’re not covering the threats to Google in all of this.
Assuming you can Google from the browser, what is the threat? Google does not sell tablets. Google open sourced android so there is an advanced computing platform available to anyone who wants to build mobile devices. The only threat to Google would be if there were only one proprietary platform that every one had to use, and that had a tendency to squeeze all profits from its eco system. This fear seems to be shared by Amazon.
Wow. Google seems so magnanimous. Almost like a charity.
I thought they were distributing an operating system so they could sell ads. Their entire economic model for Android is based on people using their services. That’s why they enforce the no-Skyhook, no-Bing rule.
The threat is that nobody will use the ‘official’ Android tablets.
BTW, everyone ‘squeezes’ profits from their products. Not just evil-controlling-capiitalistic Apple.
By the way, Google makes more from search on the ‘one proprietary’ phone OS than they do on Android. (You can Google that). Doesn’t’ seem like a threat.
Throwing R&D money in a toilet so Amazon can come drink your milkshake is more of an threat than a successful iPad. Amazon cut out Google App Store. Google Android branding. Google services. Regular people will think Amazon made the entire thing. That’s not good for Google. Even if they are running the charity you think they are.
The Kindle Fire is a mini tablet computer version of Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader. Announced on September 28, 2011, the Kindle Fire has a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS technology and runs a forked version of Google’s Android operating system. The device—which includes access to the Amazon Appstore, streaming movies and TV shows, and Kindle’s e-books—was released to consumers in the United States on November 15, 2011. `’,`
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