The Big Picture » Blog Archive » Amazon Apologizes to Michael Lewis Over Kindle Flap
Amazon’s super useful crowd sourced reviews was a great innovation. From their own selfish perspective, AMZN should be more protective of that. They should consider how Yahoo allowed their comment streams (for just about every property) to become polluted with touts and spam and trolls and haters to the point where it is no longer useful. Then Bezos might want to notice the long slider in YHOO’s stock price over the same period. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Great to see the eminent Barry Ritholz take issue with Amazon’s review system trashing Michael Lewis’s new book, which I wrote about the other day. My main concern is Ritholz’s main point excerpted above: Amazon’s crowd-sourced review system is, to me, the main competitive advantage for shopping at Amazon. If the reviews get polluted by trolls, spammers, or idiots, I will find Amazon a lot less useful, and I will look for other places to shop online.
