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Comment by _lex | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about the mayday feature - is it free, and is it included on the $139 device? I can easily see my parents burning through $139 in tech support over a single weekend, just to get things setup. I can also see lonely people calling just to see someone and talk, and presenting fake issues that they need help with. Finally, I can see mayday leading to the sort of technological illiteracy that you see in a household when one person is responsible for all IT support - the other person winds up barely able to log into their own accounts because someone else always solves their problems for them.

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My guess would be that Amazon are counting on them then buying movies, apps and books to make up for it.

This feels like a response to poor user engagement and given that on-going purchases are a big part of Amazon's aim for these devices that would be a problem for them.

Remember too that this could / should be a one off cost to Amazon for each Fire user. When / if your parents like the tablet and upgrade in the future, you'd hope that they then had enough familiarity not to need it again.

I dunno - my parents would never stop using such a service - it's easier than googling your problem, and they find new tech problems on a weekly basis, and they aren't great at pattern matching to solve those new problems. God help them if the device auto updates into software that looks any different....

I agree that it's a response to poor engagement, but if that's the case, I think they're trying to solve a usability problem by throwing people at it. Apple's biggest selling point for the last 4 years was "It doesn't come with a manual because it's so simple". Amazon seems to have given up on simple, and on manuals - their equivalent phrase would be "it's so complex that we've hired people to help you use it, 24/7".

I think that although this service is a small step forward for currently confused users, it's likely a huge leap backwards, because it'll leave those people confused forever, and dependent on the "amazon lady" to use their tablet for them. On the surface, this seems too ridiculously obvious, so I have to imagine that they've got an awesome game plan that is yet to be revealed.

It seems to me that Amazon is solving new issues this way. Their online ordering process is still the simplest around (especially once you set up one-click - although that leads to my situation of frequent unexpected Amazon packages from impulse buys).

Thinking about it a little more, Bezos has said that the Amazon process overall is about massive scale and when you're dealing with massive scale you remove every minor pain point because at massive scale even small pain multiples up to have a significant hit.

Thinking about it with that in mind, this could be Amazon using Mayday as a way of learning where people have pain so they can remove it in future versions.

Perhaps it should be seen as the largest usability study in history?

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