Amazon pays almost half-a-billion $ "domination fee" and still depends on

Christmas Time!

Amazon has an impressing strategy of growth, at the same time announcing a loss of maybe half-a-billion USD. But when we look at the turnover, we see non-suprisingly a peak at same time of each year. It's Christmas Time what drives amazon's growth year by year. The turnover from other branches like Cloud Services or Kindle Phones seem not to play a relevant role, at least not yet. This is no suprise, too.
Paying a billion dollars for an e-sports social & media platform is somehow visionary. We will learn how this fits into a company, which depends on a pre-internet-era event like christmas shopping time. I am sure it does, Jingle Bells vs. Ego Shooter is the past. Jingle Bells & Ego Shooter is today. That sounds reasonable and includes the promise of global cross culture scalability.
Anyway, Jeff Bezos and the Dogma of Growth , should be a good game for shareholders. See how the christmas business force continues going global! Famous combats with unions, competitors and publishers! Take your part in the amazon's fight for worldwide domination vs. the rest of the world!

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Customer Annoyance Tool: DO NOT REPLY

I have found a new category of tools in the marketing & sales area. I call them Customer Annoyance Tools. These tools do exactly the opposite of what the customer expects as a good customer service. The tool we focus on today is OWC - One Way Communication. . In the field of so called "Customer Care" this is the king. His name is No-Reply.

It all starts with a friendly grafical button pretending that you mightget help you with your demands. Let's say you just have booked a long distance flight and forgot to book your special food. With a little piece of interaction this problem could be fixed. You fill out the form, where they want you to describe your problem, and they ask for your email address. Minutes later you got new mail, and you look forward to friendly an responsive service. But what do you have to read?

"Please do not reply to this e-mail. It is a post-only message.",

which in fact means "Dont call us, we call you.". Thank you! This is the typical one way communication style I guess everybody hates. It is like someones enters a room in the offline world, says whatever he or she thinks is worth telling, and leaving room without any interest of what the recipients think or like. How can anyone think this is a good style?

Why spend billions in marketing and conversion, when the most simple rules of communication are ignored? Anyone having any idea why? Shouldn't we take any chance where a customer talks directly to us? This could be the moment where we can convert customers to fans, and then get a "NO REPLY". A similar effect is using no-reply addresses for personalized newsletters. They know your name, your gender, you last sales, and they want to talk to you about some new offers. So far, OK. But you will find out very soon that they dont want to talk (which might include some interaction of yours), they want you to listen and buy, no to reply. Sounds stupid, but thats the way it is mostly. Dont ask me why, I wont reply;-).

Web Zombies I

The web is full of zombie companies, which are unable to live and unable to die. From time to time I like to watch some of these living dead.Here is our "web zombie of the month":

Once upon an time there was a company.  A famous one, almost everybody knew it. It's estimated worth was $ 580 million at its peak.  In early days the platform even was a facebook competitor, which overtook it in 2008 - regarding user numbers.

But in just 6 years the company managed to loose 90% of its value (or shall I say - was managed to loose?). The platform finally was sold for $31 million (a dollar per user, more or less). In the last years the involvment of a well-known celebrity from the music business might have helped to win some users back. But the truth is, that this extended only the time of its undead existence.

Today the platform is truly "out". No current usage statistic is provided by the company. Nobody needs it. Nobody wants it. It seems that the crowd moved on. Game over. I am talking about myspace.

Web Zombies:
The web is full of zombie companies, which are unable to live and unable to die. From time to time I like to watch some of these living dead.

We know the phenomenom from the startup scene: a great idea gets some funding, but after some time of enthusiasm, or even visible success, the company either reaches its limits, fails to create a business model, or both. But instead of being kill and buried, it  becomes a living dead. Why? Too much money has been spent, too many emotions are involved, too many reasons seemed to provide a vivid future.  Everybody knows some of these "nice-idea-didnt-work-out" companies. And in many cases one would have wished they have failed earlier and letal, instead of hanging around in the internet basement, waiting for a miracle or someone to kill it, finally.