Amazonian

Profits down 73% at Amazon. Oops. But hey, the idea is that they spend on the hardware now, to create a large captive client base for 'soft' products later. A little pain now is necessary for the bigger picture to evolve. Which is a great idea if someone else with a broad UK profile and access to a larger library wasn't around.

This means that Kindle will have to compete with other products, which wasn't quite the plan. I think it was supposed to dominate. Certainly the amount of advertising seemed to be aimed that way. Kindle, Hoover, Windows, that kind of thing.

But now is a bad time to take a rather large dent in profits and I don't think it is all Kindle based. Amazon does too much (a common complaint, but still true), but more importantly it's pricing mechanism is driving the company not the other way around. Running a business is about finding smart ways to make a margin, but Amazon have targeted crushing the competition. It isn't working, but so far they are sticking with it. I wonder how it is going? 73%.

There is a similar arrogance at work in our supermarkets. They have acquired a belief from somewhere that they can do what they like (surely not from politicians?) and rather like Banking, seem to be run by some remarkably stupid people. Years ago Sainsbury's used to regularly make the news because offers advertised around the store were not repeated at the till. So when you checked your receipt you found that the half price fish fingers were in fact charged at full price. Just a mistake, the central computer hadn't been updated with the offer, sorry. But it kept happening. So careless. No really, care less.

Tesco launch a massive media campaign about price drops, even getting them to add that this time it is a real price war. Except it wasn't. They had quietly put up the prices, so that they could drop them to much fanfare later. The greedy so and so's even 'dropped' the price to somewhere higher than they were a couple of months before. And rioters who raid their stores go to jail!