Amazon: An Evil Empire Dawns on the Internet of Things | Hacker News Reader

Amazon: An Evil Empire Dawns on the Internet of Things

zdnet.com

28 pointswalterbell18 comments

What a terribly titled article. Per arbuge's comment, this has nothing to do with the IoT.

But more egregiously...AWS recently announced their own IoT platform. https://aws.amazon.com/iot/

To title an article that just talks about the Amazon store's purposely excluding certain products as in any way relating to IoT in light of that is just...I am dumbfounded that an alleged tech site could be so misleading.

The best way to complain about a bad title on HN is to suggest a better one, so we can fix it for everybody. It isn't always obvious what a better title would be, and we can't read all the articles—often we can't read any of the articles.

I think he was complaining about ZDNet's choice of article title; the OP here just duplicated it.

The HN guidelines ask submitters not to use the original title when it is misleading or linkbait, which this title arguably was, so the user who complained had a legit point. But it makes things easier when the complaint comes with a suggestion for an accurate, neutral title.

that is completely immaterial to dang's comment, which still stands: if the user had suggested a better title, instead of complaining about the current title, dang would have simply changed the title to the better one, here on hacker news, for this community's benefit.

Yes, but what is the preferred mechanism: comment accordingly, or flag, or both?

Well, yes. This is why proprietary ecosystems are ultimately bad for everyone but the proprietor.

Everything is proprietary to some extent, all big box stores have their own internal brands, and exclusivity deals for certain brands and products. Should Walmart start selling Costco brands and vice versa? Neither Google nor Apple allow apps that circumvent their own app stores on their markets. With ApplePay there is very little chance that you'll have any other competing payment service (e.g. Google Pay, or PayPal if they'll want to go through the NFC route) that won't be using Wallet/ApplePay. If we are completely fair Google's policy towards Amazon came kinda first, Google doesn't allow the play store and services to be installed on devices which have their own app market app, this is the reason why Amazon's android Kindles didn't come with the play store (and before some one mentioned Galaxy Apps, Samsung doesn't charge money so it doesn't violates Google's policies).

These all sound like bad things. Why should one bad thing justify another?

Sure, but wouldn't it be in the best interest of consumers if the Apple TV and Chromecast did support Amazon Video? I'm not sure that this is Amazon's best negotiating tactic, but it might get a response...

It's certainly a discussion worth having. See for example, the 530 comments at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10312938

This has little to do with the IoT really. The latter is generally acknowledged to be the internet which will result once all manner of gadgets containing cheap sensors, actuators, and microprocessors are internet-enabled.

But.. how would it get to the front page of HN without mentioning IoT?

It's the title of the article not the poster's editorial...

How would it get clicks on the internet without mentioning IoT?

Apple, Google, and Amazon are all playing the same game. They each simply have different strengths.

> Store sells some, but not all, products. In other news, sun rises in east, sets in west.

Amazon does this all of the time. They set the terms for what can be sold on their website. If the vendors can't agree to those terms, then they can't sell on the website. This is what happened with the recent e-books debate. However, you only hear about the high-profile cases. AWS really doesn't have much to do with those decisions, so I'm not seeing the argument this article is making.

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