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Comment by rs186

2 days ago

Did Amazon start a new round of cost cutting, layoffs or something? Yesterday they discontinued Chime. As if Amazon is doubling down on cutting "unnecessary" services

20 comments

rs186

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specialp  2 days ago

Everyone at Amazon (The only company I have seen using it) hated using Chime, and it wasn't at all on the level of competitors. So I think it was just an unsuccessful product.

  • imurray  2 days ago

    Every product has its hate, but everyone is rarely true. Personally (no longer at Amazon) I was impressed by Chime. It was simple, but rock solid, handling large calls well. Teams is still worse for me (>9 people display is bad, even in MS Edge, when on Linux). Zoom has a finicky interface.

    Early in the pandemic I had to use many different systems as an academic, when lots of different contacts pivoted online in different ways. Chime was the least of my problems; it just worked when many other systems struggled.

    I liked the Chime meeting/calendar integration at Amazon that could ring everyone at the start of the meeting, meaning that most meetings started promptly.

  • darkwater  2 days ago

    So, what are AWS TAMs going to use to have meetings with customers? Chime was really awful.

    • mh-  2 days ago

      First thing I thought of as well. Every time I go to join an AWS call, in my head I'm thinking "oh, right. ugh."

      Hopefully they just adopt Zoom and not something even more obscure.

      1 reply →

  • accelbred  2 days ago

    On the other hand, at Amazon, people I know like Chime. Sad its going away.

    • 93po  2 days ago

      i had to use it when amazon was a client of my employer and it was hot garbage in my opinion

snotrockets  2 days ago

AWS (which isn't Amazon, really, even if they share resources), used to bake the cost of keeping the lights on practically forever, or at least until the last user churns. The product may not see improvements if it didn't get traction, but you could bank on being able to use it forever.

When they did decide to kill something, like non-VPC EC2, you'd get the notice a literal decade ahead. For this specific example, sunset started end of '13, with the last instance shut off mid '23.

This all started to change a couple of years ago, when they became much more aggressive with doing the Googles and just killing a thing with a few months of a warning. Pity.

ravenstine  2 days ago

They're also getting rid of the "Download & Transfer via USB" option for Kindle books, which was the last available option for directly removing DRM. But it does also mean that owners of older Kindle devices without WiFI are basically screwed.

OJFord  2 days ago

I don't know if I'd reach that conclusion because of Chime - there's also Blink & Ring, a lot of overlap and confusion in cameras & security.

  • dowager_dan99  2 days ago

    Chime is their online meetings app, not their doorbell camera

    • OJFord  1 day ago

      Ah I was thinking of Ring Chime. (I'm sure there is a third overlapping with Ring & Blink though, can't recall name.)