Has Amazon finally gone cuckoo? Bezos' behemoth turns to crowdfunding for Alexa-powered timepiece In less than three decades, Amazon has taken a wrecking ball to dozens of industries from retail and groceries, to logistics and web hosting. And now it's settled on its next victim: the cuckoo clock industry. No, really. Amazon is dipping a toe into an sector most keenly associated with lederhosen-wearing artisans toiling in …
but this is only natural! I mean, why would YOU pay design and development costs, when you can sell, at practically no cost to you, the IDEA to many, many people who will then pay YOU to develop this idea into a product, they'll promote it for YOU for free and then, voila - you have a product that makes YOU money. And if it doesn't? Well - you paid nothing, you took no risk, you take no blame. Genius! It reminds me of another idea, already painted over, on a bus. That sold well to people who wanted to believe it was a real promise and, well, they have only themselves to blame to take it either literally, or semi-literally, right? ;)
Or, more precisely, a clock with a Bluetooth hands free kit in which is locked down so you can't use it as a standard Bluetooth device and clock. Its Bluetooth functionality only works if you connect it with a separate Amazon device which already does almost all of what this does. If you don't have one, then the audio part will be useless. I'm not sure, but I think it might also not even set the time. It might have a manual mechanism for that though.
Honestly, what surprised me the most about this article is the revelation that there are still products on Amazon that aren't cheap Chinese tat with multiple listings under different unpronouncable names that all look like someone mashed a Latin alphabet keyboard, and phony reviews.
Amazon has been actively courting Chinese sellers for a few years now, even offering them a direct-to-the-West logistics service, and it shows. Shopping on Amazon is now just as much of a crapshoot as Alibaba.
As a former resident of Switzerland I must protest in the strogest possible terms: Lederhosen are "a thing" in parts of Bavaria and Austria, in Switzerland, not so much. The artisans manufacturing the pricey goods for Zurich's tourist traps (Schweizer Heimatwerk) are actually often disabled people, it's a sensible programme to provide employment for the disadvantaged.
Hi Carl and welcome.
Don't tell me, you were searching for cuckoo and my name came up.
(Fellow commentards at least seem tolerant towards my wacky sense of humour...)
(Background info: Carl is a fellow veteran Delphi coder, from v1).
Great to reestablish contact with you; a bit more substantial than a fleeting encounter on an escalator at Victoria station (IIRC)! To be honest, programming is more of a hobby, these days, but I have been keeping an eye on go(lang) - it seems to be the sanest, least self-indulgent language out there - signs of "Singleton Factories" are mercifully thin! Fueled by government support, I have just enough income to eat on a day-to-day basis, and indulge my growing interest/obsession with electronic music. My current technical object of love is this beauty https://www.bitwig.com - I swear that finding Bitwig was as mind-blowing as discovering Delphi back in February 1995!
Actually, if you need any command-line-driven text utilities, let me know! We could maybe do business!
Oh, by the way, I switched to Apple Mac 4 years ago. I splashed out on a refurbished Apple Mac Pro (early 2009) and I swear it's the best computer I've ever owned. It;'s got 32 GB of RAM and I've tweaked it via http://dosdude1.com/mojave/ so that I can run macOS Mojave. (Seriously, let me know if you need any Apple Mac tech knowledge, I'm not too bad, these days!). I don't know if you've experienced Windows interpretation of Linux, but you should see the underlying OS of macOS which is basically FreeBSD ;-)
Anyhow, please stay in touch, Ken,
Cheers,
Carl
