Amazon ads stuffing and upcoming “China Crisis.”

This article on #amazon stuffing its search results with ads reminded me of the tipping point when I did the switch from #altavista to #google search.

When the results are optimised to sell you something vs tuned to answer your search, the user starts to lose confidence in the service.

As David J. Carr suggested:

This behaviour is probably rooted in the tension between Bezo’s “I’m sceptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centrepiece” and Olsavsky’s “Our strategy is to make the customer experience additive by the ad process”.

Moreover, it indicates a switch from quantity over quality as they are probably willingly accepting that they can’t guarantee the quality & the authenticity of the products sold by the swarm of third-party vendors under the Amazon brand ( as in via Amazon website).

Last but not least, Brands and Sellers are increasingly competing with 3-week product lifecycle of pseudo-brands. Chinese producer can get to market a smartwatch lookalike within five days and using these self-serve ad platforms can outspend x100 at the bottom of the funnel.

As it becomes hard to compete with those Amazon is naturally increasingly banking on its logistics and distribution platform advantage. When the pseudo-brand life-cycle shorten the only common part of the product experience that will remain constant will be the delivery experience.

Links of the day 27/08/2015 : PCIe fabric, One Time SSH key and China ARM processor

• Dolphin PCIe fabric : seems that the PCIe fabric is getting a lot of news recently, nice to see that we are reaching the 300 nanoseconds latency. While greater bandwidth and lower latency is really great this bring a certain amount of challenge as DRAM access time is still around 10-30 nanoseconds. Implying that if we the CPU needs to do anything with this data it only has ~250 nanoseconds to do so before moving to the next one. I wonder when we wills start to see event based GPGPU or FPGA approach in CPU in order to handle such performance. Maybe its time to move toward stream oriented CPU architecture ? 
• One-Time SSH Keys : I like this concept, it allow the use of single-use key ready for connecting to untrusted system. With single-use keys, even if the key is compromised, it will have already been used, and would be of little use.
• China ARM : Homegrown ARM v8 based cpu chips. Seems that the Chinese are getting serious in leveraging homegrown solution in the CPU field and especially HPC. From this expertise they hope to spin off in the scale out computing (high density, low power). Maybe the ARM server breakthrough will come from the Asian market?