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
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.
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.
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.
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.
