Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are
via engadget.com
Wherever they are…….in the United States.
The Cloud Drive is available to everyone (5GB free storage, nice) because the AWS guys understand this stuff. The Cloud Player is of course, not.
Wow, it’s actually even more brain-dead than I thought. I can upload songs to the Cloud Drive and play them in my browser. I just can’t do exactly the same thing on my Android phone. Ye know, where 99% of people would play music.Next test, to see if I can play the music in the browser on my phone!Left-hand/right-hand, Amazon?
HAH! The bloody phone browser trick works. What muppets are running this division in Amazon?Shonen Knife FTW.
No one succeeds, that are afraid to fail
Ah now. If AMZN was a start-up, I wouldn’t even have written this post. I have never had a dig at Spotify for example, I know what they are up against. But a massive _global_ company that has been selling _globally_ since the 1990s shouldn’t be making these schoolboy errors.From what I’ve read, Amazon tends to run each division as a separate company so that the team that builds the Kindle software for Android/Apple is not part of the team that builds the Kindle itself. Whilst I love that idea of internal incubation, the danger is that you end up siloed like Google with no-one talking to each other and simultaneous car-crashes like Latitude and Buzz happening. It seems clear that those building the Amazon Android Apps need to talk to their co-workers who have been shipping CDs to Ireland for 13+ years. This has nothing to do with the music companies and licensing, it’s just lack of a global outlook. They would have to toggle one just flag when uploading to the Android App store to avoid this nonsense of us not being able to play our own uploaded music in Ireland and the rest of the world.