After playing with Quora for a couple of days, I’m starting to see the appeal of it. The format is clear and easy to use, but a bigger draw is that sometimes questions can be answered by people who actually have involvement with the issues.
For example, one person asked, “Why does Amazon brag incessantly about Kindle sales but refuse to disclose specifics?” And a response came from none other than Vinay Kruvila, whose by-line states he has worked for Amazon for 5 years and is currently its Software Development Manager. He writes:
Amazon is an incredibly data-driven company. Every strategic decision at Amazon is backed by a wealth of data, and is associated with precise, measurable goals. Even every day tactical decisions are largely data-driven. If you follow prices of items on Amazon, you’ll see how the discount on a book can rise from 34% to 37%, from one day to the next. When Amazon considers entering new markets, the sales metrics competitors have released (perhaps, foolishly) are a key data-point.
When you work at Amazon, you realize how important the numbers are. Releasing Kindle sales numbers would only feed into the hands of Amazon’s competitors; there’s a big difference in knowing that the Kindle is the best selling product ever on Amazon and knowing that Amazon sold X million Kindles in 2010. Amazon believes in taking credit for the impressive things we do in ways that are subtle and sophisticated, without providing data that will help current and potential competitors.
While I still wish Amazon would be more forthcoming with its numbers, at least this is one of the best explanations I’ve yet seen for why it is not.
while i’m sure they’d never disclose the number, amazon has at minimum several hundred software development managers (and they’ve got job listings up for nearly 70 more), so the “exec” in the title is probably not appropriate.
Which explains why Apple completely fails in marketing and selling its products. By giving away quarterly sales numbers, they completely… ah…. wait?
What?
Face it. Amazon’s numbers are either good or they’re bad. If they were all that great or impressive, they’d tout them. Since they don’t, one gets the impression that while it may be a “best-selling product”, the numbers, in and as of themselves, are NOT that impressive.
Which then makes it simple: By refusing to give numbers, Amazon can continue to create the IMPRESSION that everyone and their kid brother is jumping on board the Kindle bandwagon. Even if “everyone” is not.
And as opposed to, say, the iPad bandwagon….
Self justifying clap trap. Period.
The guy(s) at the top are clearly hyper defensive and obsessed with the feeling that giving away actual data will bring the house down (which is quite comical considering Amazon’s success) .. and they pass that on to the middle management. Hence the clap trap.
They aren’t worried about competitor’s knowing the actual number; they are worried about publishers.
If publisher’s know the exact size of the Kindle market, then that information will dictate how they price their more popular e-books. Contrary to popular belief, e-books are anything but infinitely scalable- if their are 8 million Kindles out there, and 2 million additional users that have just use the apps (amazon has said 80% of their customers own Kindle), then a publisher can really only expect to sell 10 million copies. Even if they are publishing a previously unknown eighth Harry Potter and pricing it at 2 cents.
Obviously, since Amazon wants prices as low as possible, they don’t tell people how small the market really is.
They also don’t want people to realize that dedicated ADE e-pub readers, as a category, are already more popular than Kindle.
Jeff Bezos had said to Charlie Rose that it was for competitive reasons – sort of intimating that the other makers should not know exactly how much were needed production-wise, as with Barnes and Noble getting caught WAY short last year when releasing the Nook. They were just not prepared for the demand there -was-.
The danger is in making not enough (at Christmas time) OR in making and being stuck with too many and the cost of producing them if they overestimate.
He said something about other companies being kept off-guard … it does make sense to me. AND it’s also true that many columnists/opinion-makers have minimized and continue to minimize e-reader numbers by always equating them with another type of device such as multimedia models, and hard numbers would give solid ammunition to those who seem to enjoy the nyah-nyah type of writing as one I saw today that mentioned that Amazon wants to avoid it being known that more iPads are sold than Kindles but that the truth will out.
And of course any fool already knows multimedia devices have a larger audience.
It’s like equating the sales of a specific camera to sales of a phone with a camera.
“…that mentioned that Amazon wants to avoid it being known that more iPads are sold than Kindles…”
If many, many more iPads are being sold than Kindles, despite the Kindle being Amazon’s “best-selling device”, then comparisons will in fact be made, both by the media AND by the buying public. And that, regardless of whatever device category you think they should be in.
As I said, by refusing to give numbers, Amazon can continue to create the IMPRESSION that everyone is jumping on board the Kindle bandwagon.
In short, it’s all about perception. If it gets out that Kindle sales are but a fraction of iPad sales, then more people will go the iPad route instead of the Kindle route, much as HD DVD sales tanked when it became apparent that BluRay was “winning”.
“Which explains why Apple completely fails in marketing and selling its products. By giving away quarterly sales numbers, they completely… ah…. wait?”
This with a cherry on top!
When your actual sales numbers and profits will never top the hype you can drum up with nothing to show for it… people eventually catch on.