Amazon is pathetic in this respect. The company always comes out with statements about how many Kindles they sold, but provide nothing to back it up. The press is partly responsible for letting them get away with it, but you can’t claim that news coverage is unfair if you’re not willing to comment.
Amazon complains about coverage it won’t comment on
Replace partly with fully, I think. Companies generally get away with exactly as much as they can get away with. It’s the job of the skeptical press to call them on it.
(That’s not to say it’s ethical of the companies to pile on the bullshit, but with most companies it’s going to happen.)
Amazon: “Wah! The press won’t collude with us distorting reality for our personal benefit!”
A friend of mine works in the MP3 department. But the company has policies about not letting anyone work in one department for more than a few years. So he can’t get a legitimate response to his objections to his latest review, and has been told to prepare to be shown the door – regardless of how good a job he did.
They can’t even be straight with their own employees! What hope do the rest of us have? Remember when a website popped up on the net to let people know about a phone number where you can actually talk to a human at Amazon? Nobody could find it by searching their website.
There is hardly a skeptical press anymore. Most news coverage is PR.
The only difference between amazon and Walmart, is that Amazon is publicly traded. Perhaps the Amazon and google folks can get together on this drone thing, eh?
Walmart is publicly traded.
Meanwhile, I notice that Amazon has a heavily discounted bundle of the FireTV and one of the Kindle Fire tablets.
Either people with the pair buy an extraordinary amount of content, or the Fire TV isn’t selling very well. Any bets?
It would be nice if Amazon did ever give a statement on how many Kindles they sold, but I believe they only report how many multiples of Kindles sold vs. previous years, e.g., twice as many as last year. All Kindle sales reports with actual quantities are based on third-party estimates.