Amazon has in recent months been named as the ‘monster’ responsible for killing off high street retail businesses. It’s so convenient, especially if you use the Prime service, and if you have Alexa as well, you barely need to stir from your armchair. The firm is so invaluable to our daily lives that it has become the most valuable public company worldwide, and that makes it very powerful.
The battle over streaming services
Then there is Google, another giant company. Amazon is already in a war with Google over streaming services. Some time ago, Amazon banned any streaming service from its Amazon store, because they competed with Amazon’s own streaming hardware. The reason it gave was this; it was to avoid “customer confusion.”
In an email, Amazon said: “Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prim. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”
A game of tit-for-tat
Of course this led to a tit-for-tat response that escalated in 2017. For example, YouTube blocked the availability of its videos on Amazon’s Echo Show hardware, saying that this move was purely due to a “broken user experience.”
Amazon’s response was to ban more Google products from its site, by adding the Google Nest hardware to its blacklisted products.
Amazon also managed to find a workaround for its Echo Show users ho wanted to use YouTube, but Google managed to block that. YouTube then informed owners of Amazon’s Fire TV products that YouTube would no longer work on that hardware either. Basically, the feud hit rock bottom, because now customers experienced a broken experience on whichever platform they tried to use.
Google issued this statement: “”We’ve been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services. But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.”
A playground tiff
Doesn’t it remind you of a playground tiff at a kindergarten? Rather than setlle the issue like two professional companies, they have indulged in a massive spat that leaves customers — the very people that are most important to them –wondering where else they can get a similar service from. They also showed that companies as powerful as they are can simply “eliminate integral functionality” when they feel like it, which demonstrates to consumers that they don’t really own what they have purchased. And how has the consumer responded? By continuing to use both these services and pushing them towards even greater domination, all for the sake of convenience. Surely there is a lesson to be learnt here?