Inside Amazon-dot-com

In its quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, Seattle based Amazon.com, the largest US eCommerce company, admitted that it has missed bith revenue and profit estimates for Q3, 2014. These disappointing third-quarter results see the online retailer’s shares at 9 percent lower than the 7 to 18 percent revenue growth that was originally forecasted. This loss has taken more than $15 billion off of Amazon’s market value (now at $144.7 billion) and seen their stock plummet 13 percent since the poor Q2 results announced in July. Amazon is reporting losses around $437 million resulting from failed product launches and various acquisitions and expansions that take the ecommerce company further and further away from their original charter and core competency. Amazon continues to invest heavily in hardware devices, expanding it to include a phone and dropping the word "Kindle" from their Tablet line of products, simplifying it to just Fire. However,  the hyped...

Last week, Amazon unveiled the much-anticipated or at least   much-hyped 3D smart phone,  following up with an email to all its customers introducing the phone with the slogan "The First Smartphone Designed by Amazon". That slogan sounds a bit strange since the Amazon brand is not associated with product design excellence so "the first blah designed by Amazon" does not really carry much weight with us - Amazon did pioneer the eBook reader business with Kindle and dominates it, but that's not because of its elegant design, more because of ready availability of the content at bargain prices, which in turn is based on  Amazon’s willingness to sell both the device and eBooks at a loss to gain market share.  Brilliant business strategy, perhaps, but IMHO, that does not set Amazon as a product design excellence star. All that slogan does is tell us that Amazon is not too proud to be (just) a company that efficiently operates warehouses and packs & deliv...