And I disagree with you about a discontinued product hurting their brand. No-one remembers Amazon menu, Amazon movie listings, Microsoft Courier, Google Catalogs, Wave, Google labs etc.
In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general.
Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.
Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.
So true.
I disagree. I think most people know. Amazon was once a bookstore, then it changed; it's now the website where you buy things. If you're in IT it is also the major host for cloud computing.
There it is in a sentence (two for IT specialists). Does this leave out major things like video? Sure, but you asked about the brand, and that seems pretty clear: that website where you buy stuff.
Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft.
There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned.
It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.)
Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
Amazon is an online hypermarket, and I don't think that's even remotely a secret.
People understood the company mission of Sears, Roebuck, & Company, a hundred years ago, and they can certainly understand Amazon's today.
- people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?)
- when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts.
There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.