Amazon's Conformity...

[Lman316]

I've known this for a while, but just lately, I decided to vent. Has anyone else noticed the way that Amazon will buy out/merge with another website or company and just destroy it? They move in like the Borg and assimilate any individuality right out of a site.
Toysrus.com, CDNOW.com and some others are victims of this.
CDNOW was a good site to check for new albums and to preview music (and you can still do that), but I'm just so tired of Amazon changing everything - they're all uniform and I prefered the older formats better.
I just wonder what Toysrus.com might look like if it wasn't headed by Amazon; I wonder if they'd actually put up what they do have in stock, rather than what's been "discontinued or not available..."

End...

[LTBasker]

This reminds me of another company; Hasbro.

They bought out and destroyed several companies, mainly Galoob was the biggest destruction. At least Amazon didn't shut them down after merging with them.

[Jargo]

Amazon suffers from the same thing a lot of sites do and that's too much information on the one page. It's messy and confusing and most times what you want is hidden under a huge pile of random other crap. I've only ever once used Amazon and it sucked as a service. They're the internet outlet for my favourite bookstore - Waterstones and I just can't bring myself to attempt to buy. I only use amazon now as some kind of reference library to find items and make a note of the product numbers and codes before heading off elsewhere to smaller stores to buy.

Amazon is so bloody bland too. It has to be the dullest internet experience going. Or at least a strong contender.

[JediTricks]

TRU's website was never really up to their needs, it turned out to be cheaper and more efficient to let Amazon handle the web-business end. The real problem with the web, especially since the user-end now has such high speed access, is that it's very difficult for a company to actually make money on it. If you're a store, all of your programs have to be able to handle massive amounts of traffic at once without failure while simultaneously coexisting with a dozen other programs. As the demand for larger, higher-quality pictures gets bigger and bigger, the cost to the website becomes astronomical - especially if you want bandwidth that can handle multiple users without blowing a gasket. Ultimately, Amazon understands all this and has the technology to make large web-business work without costing the company a huge fortune - it's cheaper, more efficient, and easier to deal with by letting Amazon take the burden of that stuff.

Unfortunately, unless the prices of bandwidth, hosting & management, program development, and other web-based-business technologies can catch up to the higher-speed needs of the massive end-user base, only web-savy companies like Amazon will be able to do business online at a profit.

Think of Amazon as the owner and operator of a mall where the mall even supplies the employees - which would a company like TRU rather do, try to build and maintain a megastore that will almost certainly operate at a loss, or simply open a store within the mall where the mall pays for electricity and guarantees ample parking and fast checkout lines for the customers?