Amazon is going down
For many years, Amazon was my favorite company. Best customer service, best assortment, best prices, fastest shipping - best everything.
They seemed to take the growth step from a medium to a huge company effortlessly.
Not anymore.
Amazon now sucks like a Microsoft, Comcast or any giant company who has been seduced by its monopolistic market power.
Not learning from history they repeat the mistakes other huge companies made. For a company that size, it can take years until it becomes visible on the market that karma bit back.
Just look at Microsoft. "MicroWHO?" would any millennial say. While the mobile age arrived and Microsoft was busy trying to force their desktop products on us and celebrated bad customer service like it was its 100 anniversary they overlooked who really has the power.
They are irrelevant to the millennials, the mobile generation. Good luck with the bing users. Those few who lack the technical knowledge to replace bing with a decent search engine. Giving (and forcing) away the newest milk cow for free might secure some market shares in the desktop market. And companies take longer to replace, test and implement new software.
Now Amazon is doing it too.
They outsourced customer service to the far-away land where nobody gives a damn. It´s about cutting and pasting something not even faintly related to the customer inquiry - not customer satisfaction or solving a problem.
Sadly, companies never seem to realize how expensive bad customer service is. Returning clients are the cheapest acquisitions. New clients are more expensive ... but clients who left because a company sucked? Very expensive.
A while back one of the competent Amazon customer service agents could solve a problem with one call. Now you have weeklong forth- and back with several agents. Some even speak some form of English ... or Indlish. Is that really cheaper???
The number of forced unwanted crappy apps on their hardware seems to be growing by the minute. Alexa can´t even see Siri´s face from down there where she is standing with her limited voice recognition capabilities.
They made their fire phone and the newest tablet generation jailbreak-safe (for now). Every day I delete "The New Yorker" and every day amazon forces it on my device again. What do you think, Amazon? I reward that with buying a subscription to the New Yorker??? More than half of the first page of the current Kindle fire generation is full of unwanted applications.
When I have the choice between bad customer service and bad customer service with more applications and faster updates .... I´ll be back, google. Just waiting for "Kindi 4" to break.
I found someone on Craiglist who missed the sign of times and gave me 120 for my Fire phone. I felt officially like a gangster.
For the longest time, Amazon managed what most giants failed to do: Managing growth, keeping innovative and customer friendly.
Goodbye, Amazon, I will miss you for what you once were.
New players will enter the market. They will be more customer friendly, more innovative and flexible. And there´s life in the old dogs yet. But not in you.
While Apple has the intelligence to form strategic relationships (SAP, IBM); MS is the excellence of OEM; so that they can afford p.... clients off - who´s your strategic alliance, Amazon?
Taking them on all at once, aren´t you? The clients, the google, the apple - and the laws of the market. You can be proud on what you achieved until you became common, Amazon.
I loved you, Amazon. Goodbye. I won´t throw a stone when I see one of your drones deliver a 12-hour parcel sometime soon.
