Amazon announced a version of the Kindle that can be had for $25 less, providing you are willing to subject yourself to screensavers that are ads and banner ads at the bottom of the home screen. I don’t have a problem with ads but my reaction is still negative.
Amazon is saying I am only worth $25.
Okay so Amazon has to create the market first but with their volumes they won’t have a problem doing that. However, I know I am worth a hell of a lot more than $25 given my demographics and purchasing behaviors, a fact Amazon knows very well given my transaction history, yet Amazon is flat lining me and making, potentially, a lot more on the arbitrage of the discount they are giving me relative to the ads they can deliver to me assuming I bought the device.
Interestingly I really don’t have a reaction to the ad-powered Kindle but I do have a negative reaction to Amazon on the grounds of basic fairness. I should have more control over how much I can sell my ad attention for and Amazon should deliver this in the form of dynamic pricing that gives me a bigger discount on a Kindle.
[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]
In the same vein:
About Jeff Nolan
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
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About Venture Chronicles
About Venture Chronicles
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software.
I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market.
I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
