Re: (TV) Amazon.com

["Philip P. Obbard" <pobbard@yahoo.com>]

As a web developer, I desperately *want* to hate Amazon.com for exactly those
reasons, but I find myself overwhelmed in the same way finding a Dunkin' Donuts
or a Starbucks in a crappy midwestern American town does. I think Amazon has
done a great job building a useful, reliable, intuitive online service. It's
really insane when I, living in New York City and a frequenter of many of the
finest underground (Subterranean, Rockit, etc.) and "overground" (Virgin,
Tower) music stores still find myself resorting to Amazon.com to occasionally
find an import or cutout CD. The same goes for their book selection. I have
never received the wrong thing or waited unnecessarily long for something from
Amazon, although many people reportedly have. Even when I don't buy from them,
I use the site to browse books and CDs an even read reviews of their material.

I even put up with my girlfriend - an employee of textbooks.com, a subsidiary
of Barnes and Noble and one of Amazon's biggest competitors - complaining each
time I use it! I place an order about once every two months - I still buy way
more CDs at the shops in NYC - but I'm not unhappy when I do.

As an aside, when my company went to get patents for the stuff we've built
(granted, much lamer than Amazon's one-click) our patent lawyers told us stuff
like "one click" never holds up under duress. Companies get patents just in
case they ever prove useful - not because they necessarily expect them to be
enforceable. For them, it's thousands of times easier to get a patent now than
to lose out later.

--Philip

--- Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com> wrote:
> 
> There's actually a number of reasons to dislike Amazon.  I have a real
> problem, for example, with their attempt to patent a "one-click shopping"
> method of building a shopping cart.  They didn't invent it - websites had
> been doing it a long time - but their lawyers decided it was patentable,
> so now people using this common sense method run the risk of running
> of having lawyers a-plenty come knocking.


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