Another example of the tech behemoths encroaching on smaller businesses with their hordes of cash and economies of scale. At this rate, I wonder if they will move into the public utilities space soon. Oh wait...
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@bryantchou Did I hear you say 'encroaching'? Maybe you should call the tech-cops. 👮👮👮
@rrhoover already pointed out that it's probably a strategic move by Amazon to save one of it's key businesses. In any case, isn't competition considered a benefit of capitalism?
@patrick_udeh@rrhoover I'm mostly thinking of this article http://www.economist.com/news/le... and how it's increasingly difficult for the competition to reap the benefits of capitalism. ie: huge companies never getting to IPO stage (uber, etc), which prevents liquidity options for employees of said companies, and the public from benefiting from their rise.
As with many things Amazon does, they're undercutting existing players with their new photo printing service. @sarahintampa has a good overview in TechCrunch, highlighting one of its competitors, Shutterfly.
This is clearly a strategy to bring more people into Amazon Prime and all of its services. I was unable to find a way to upload photos without using Amazon Drive, which was kind of frustrating but understandable.
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@rrhoover@sarahintampa THIS is very very interesting move!! Being a long standing Prime member, I'll give it a test drive for sure. Thanks for sharing - You're faster than Amazon :)
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@rrhoover Amazon getting started building a closed ecosystem. Smart move.
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Will be interesting to see how Shutterfly react to this, given that their CEO use to lead Amazon UK for a while and moved over this year.
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@anthony_stylianou Ha. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon started this business out of spite for him leaving.
"Leave us will you? We'll show you!"
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@anthony_stylianou It's launching with only a subset of features of Shutterfly. That being said, I think they hit the nail on the head. Deliver the basics to the casual family photographer at a fantastic price. Especially for existing Prime users that already get free photo storage.
Seem to have collaborated with some 3rd party printer, "S&D Print", get an Auth request from them when trying to sign-in to order. Overall, this is a pretty rad move, with Amazon's customer service to back it up, should be interesting how the prints turn out.
These are the permissions they require (specifically access to your Amazon drive) which for non-users is going to be a pain (even as a current user, it is not the greatest interface to locate the pics you want to print):
When you click "Okay", we'll provide S&D Print:
- Your name:
- Your e-mail address:
- Any Amazon Payments shipping addresses selected during checkout.
- Access to your photos stored in Amazon Drive
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Doh...8x10 is the max they'll do (perhaps for now). Hopefully poster prints will be available in the near future.
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@sarthakgrover Maybe this will inspire other sites to integrate with Amazon Drive too! Competition driving collaboration :)
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