I've always been a great fan of Amazon. I really have for many years felt they are a company which embraced the new paradigm of e-commerce and really did put the customer first. I've been using them since 1995 (I used to buy books and CDs from them and ship them over to the UK from the US until they established a European presence).
Amazon bought Dpreview along with many, many other small 'community' companies (e.g. IMDB, another UK company) back in the mid-90s because they understood the subscriber model. Back in the nineties, as the e-commerce pundit Thomas Power stated: "content+community=e-commerce".
By purchasing content companies, with a strong community Amazon added potential customers. It is always a lot easier in business to 'inside-sell', e.g. sell more stuff to people who are already your customers or clients.
This was and actually I think still is, a very clever strategy (and I base this on my experience starting one of the first e-commerce companies in the UK which is still successfully trading albeit without any involvement from myself for over 20 years).
However, as an old man one thing I have seen again and again in my lifetime is great companies getting too big, then getting out of touch with their values and then their customers. In the end, loyal customers are rewarded by being treated in a more and more indifferent, or even hostile manner.
It saddens me to think that Amazon has turned this corner.
Bezos chose the name Amazon because back in 1994 he recognised that the internet would become the biggest, widest, deepest channel to market for goods and services. That is why Amazon is such a broad business in terms of products and services. Again, a very clever vision. I always expected Bezos to be worth considerably more than Bill Gates, who at the time Amazon was founded was, iirc, the richest man in the world. I think Bezos achieved a bigger fortune than Gates until Musk came along.
Anyhoo, it is clear to me, and it saddens me no end, that Amazon has turned the corner into treating consumers like a resource and to be enlisted and abandoned with nothing but indifference.
To cast off Dpreview is in the medium and long term a truly dumb idea. Photographers are a niche community but boy do they spend money. E-commerce is about the 'long-tail' model, creating many, many, many, valuable niche markets and selling products and services to them. I thought Amazon understood that but clearly - and it is probably a generational thing - the original thinkers and planners have moved on and the 'shareholder value' guys have stepped in, closing down businesses where there is no direct income to the bottom line.
Shame really, but at least Chris and Jordan are moving on to Peta-Pixel and considering I have been watching them since their first YouTube review (a m43rds camera, iirc) at least they won't disappear from our screens.
RIP Amazon.... er... I mean.... Dpreview (Freudian slip there).