Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Amazon.com & What politics has to do with it?


"Do artifacts have politics?" This has been the hot topic for many Anthropologists and it also spread to our HS class this week.I will explain this by taking an example of world renowned website "Amazon.com".

Amazon.com, is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company.It is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the Intenet sales revenue.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 and launched it online in 1995.It was named as Amazon because the Amazon River is the largest river in the world, showing its vastness of resources and partly also because it start with "A", the first letter in the Alphabets, and therefore strives to be the top most consumer satisfactory company.

It started as an online bookstore, as most of us know it as, but it soon diversified, selling DVDs, CDs, MP3 downloads, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, and toys. It also provides international shipping to certain countries for some of its products.

It was spurred by what Bezos called "regret minimization framework" , his effort to fend off regret for not staking a claim in the Internet gold rush.
Its logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z, representing its goal to have every product in the alphabet.

So how such a consumer oriented company can fall into what Winner said "Artifacts have politics"?
Amazon's initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years. Its "slow" growth provoked stockholder complaints that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, and many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered, and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $5 million or 1¢ per share, on revenues of more than $1 billion, but the modest profit was important in demonstrating the business model could be profitable. In 1999, Time magazine named Bezos Person of the Year, recognizing the company's success in popularizing online shopping.

And now ,The company remains profitable with nearly 1 billion transactions going on every year, far more than its peer companies.It has the largest demand now living upto its name Amazon.

So, almost it seems like as neutral as Aesop's tongue, striving to have its roots in the world economy, working hard and finally got a place where it waves its flag like a mountaineer waving his country's flag on Mt.Everest but the website Amazon.com also has its pitfalls attracting criticism and controversy from multiple sources over its actions, such as its "1-Click patent" claims, anti-competitive actions, price discrimination, anti-unionization efforts, Amazon Kindle remote content removal, and low corporate tax payments. Various decisions over whether to censor or publish content such as the WikiLeaks web site, LGBT book sales rank, works containing libel have been controversial. Recently Amazon removed Wikileaks's content from its EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to Wikileaks – and that it was not due to political pressure or the hacker attacks against the site.

Amazon is now also attracting backlash from the film and writing community for launching its Amazon Studios, referred to by writers as Scamazon Studios, for insisting writers give a free 18 month option on their scripts, and by claiming exclusive rights forever, without a legitimate contract - thus acting outside of International Copyright Laws.

Though it was surrounded by black clouds it perfected itself and now still remains as the leader in online shopping.

Conclusion:
So, Digital artifacts do have politics in some cases, but when they trace their path they have trod, searching their roots, they can become value neutral consumer objects to help society grow better and healthier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/

G.Abhilash Roy,
CS09B012.

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