As a consumer, I’ve used Amazon to purchase most of my books on Kindle, pretty much since Kindle first came to Australia. And in the last couple of years I’ve started buying Audible books too.
As good as Kindle is, it also frustrates me when having a library with hundreds of books that I can’t adequately manually organise and tag my collection.
There are collections, but they’re not enough when you want to organise books via multiple attributes or for different scenarios (or even half-way replicate the organisation of a bookshelf).
Amazon also doesn’t seem to know what I’ve already bought when I’m logged in to the site and browsing books. The amount of time I spend checking if I’ve already [inevitably] bought a book it’s checking… the experience is frustrating.
I’ve also used AWS as a software developer.
The documentation and help is poorly written, not suited for “generalist” developers, and often out of date. Examples pretty much don’t exist.
The console UI is hard to understand and has no aesthetic or UX thought.
Pricing is a fucking nightmare to try and figure out.
And after they bought Cloud9 they turned an intuitive experience into something I couldn’t figure out and gave up on (thankfully I can still use the original UI… for now).
Which means AWS lost at least 3 new annual users.
But what prompted this post is an Audible email I received today:
My first impression is the ugly exclamation at the start of the subject. This is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve received this email with that subject exclamation, and each time my first reaction is “SPAM” and I question its legitimacy.
I’ve been deleting the emails until now, but tonight decided to unsubscribe. And it’s giving my attention to do that, that only I realised they’re coming to my business email, not my personal email which is actually registered for Audible.
I have, however, used my business email with AWS.
So it now seems Amazon wants to spam AWS customs with advertising for consumer services.