[Swordmaker]

I’ve liked the Amazon Kindle platform, various coworkers, family members, friends have used its various iterations. If they’ve stopped in-house development, it could easily mean that they’re not driving the level of retail business they’d hoped to justify the continuing development. IOW, they may have reached the point where they’re going to let other hardware makers continue to do what they do (hardware margins have been shrinking for years, since before the first netbook was intro’d) and just keep the Amazon store apps up to date on those platforms. Orrrrr, they’re pushing dev offshore.

Ever since the first Kindle hit the market, hardware analysts have claimed that Amazon was selling them below cost. Even Amazon tacitly admitted they were loss leaders to sell e-books which they later claimed were themselves loss leaders. It's hard to see where there ever was a plan to turn the e-reader, e-book enterprise profitable. Similarly, the Fire Phone's purpose was a supposed marketing platform to feed potential buyers to Amazon products with ads with buy buttons. It too was claimed to be a "loss leader" after they dropped the initial high price. I heard the Fire TV offered ads in so-called free TV, or at least that was the initial plans. Did they ever follow through?

[dennisw]

Amazon “devices” have one purpose. To suck you into the Amazon eco-system and to keep you there. They copied this strategy from the Steve Jobs era at Apple.

[SunkenCiv]

Not sure where I just saw this, but someone online (here, or FB, or elsewhere) was complaining about ad content on Kindle. As far as profits go, Amazon posted a profit, or perhaps it was just positive earnings, sometime in 2015 (recently), first time ever, or at least first time in some years. They are taking on Walmart, or rather, they have been for some time now, and Walmart has been trying to respond.