The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.
IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.
Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.
Opt-out is NOT consent, consent requires you do know about it, at least somewhat understand it and then "say yes". Opt-out it's more like forcing with a way to defend yourself.
Can you imagine how silly it would sound to talk about all the "forcing" that MacOS and Windows do that you can change by going in to settings and changing it? Indeed, Apple has famously made tons of decisions for their users about what the reasonable defaults might be, and is praised for this; no one calls it forcing.
I get it. I don't like the defaults either. That doesn't mean you can just slap on whatever word has negative connotations and say that's what is happening.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to medium ones, who provide quality services and products and have earned the trust of their customers, workers and partners over the years without screwing them over left and right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in regards to environmental issues on top of all of this.
Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche.
Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts people into positions where they have overwhelming levels of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
in the age of consumerism, people want to consume MORE but live more minimally. This gives way to more cloud, connected services, more "renting". More.. processing by someone else, somewhere else.
And yes, people spend less time creating and doing and too much time just consuming as their main hobby. They need to spend more time outdoors, doing stuff with their hands, being creative and constructive.
And lastly - my more controversial, generalized but hyper-specific point - is up until COVID and tons of protests turned riots, people were moving into cities at a high rate. They moved into gentrified areas, down played the crime, downplayed the smog, downplayed the endless mismanagement of tax money by old corrupt city governments. They'll go as far as to call people who don't want to move into the city as being racist (for wanting to avoid the crime) or for destroying the environment b/c they don't want to live packed in like sardines in a smog filled urban center.
Well for all those hipsters who think crime isn't such a problem and only something "racists" point out - they all seem to have this incessant need for RING doorbells to keep people stealing the never ending array Amazon and other CongloMo Inc packages from their middle class porches.
They go out in the streets, pumping their fist in the air for BLM, then go home, waiting for their packages from amazon, hopefully protected by Amazon RING doorbells which are expanding the private/public partnership in an ever growing police and surveillance state. They get online and finger wag in one direction and allow their money to vote in another. They're an awful lot like rural republicans voting against their own economic interests, but at least on the Republican side there's a bit of a bait and switch going on. here, it's just direct hypocrisy.
Amazon makes things cheap and easy but not always in ways agree with.
As a counter Example, Canonical got some critique with their "telemetry in the installer", but if you ask me, they did it in the nicest way possible: They told everyone that they want some data to focus developers' efforts where it counts and they let me inspect the json object I was about to send them, so I trust them and sent it to them with a smile.
If you own an Echo device and used it prior to this feature you had already granted a large degree (relative to this feature) of trust to Amazon anyway. It reminds me a little of people who swear they will never use an Echo device due to concerns about eavesdropping but happily carry an internet microphone equiped smartphone everywhere.
We need laws against this shit
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
- For a product that was already owned and did not need it until now
- Activated by default, as optional opt-out instead of opt-in
I think it comes down to trust and a track record of commitment to privacy.
Also IMO apple handled the PR for airtags very well.
Find My is also opt-out instead of opt-in
The sheer fact of asking the user to opt-in automatically decreases opt-in rate a lot (like a LOT), even if that tech is super good. It is way easier to dismiss a dialog than to think what it even does.
That wasn't my impression. I saw plenty of criticism on HN.
The vast majority of people already have internet at home and phone plans.
Also, what's in it for Amazon? How does it profit from something like this?
Comcast does the same thing but with standard Wifi with their routers, with some hidden SSIDs you can't opt out of (Xfinity Home etc.)
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
Sidewalk isn’t a wifi network that people can just connect to, it’s a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an endpoint in AWS.
Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN immediately traceable to their AWS account.
I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.
Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.
s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.