DPReview’s Founder Blasts Amazon’s CEO: ‘What a Waste’
As Amazon prepares to start out winding down DPReview, the publication’s founder Phil Askey has publicly spoken out in opposition to the choice and put Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy on blast, calling the selection to close down the location a “waste.”
Askey, who based DPReview in 1998, stayed on with the corporate even after its acquisition by Amazon in 2007 for 3 years till he ultimately left in 2010. Regardless of the information that DPReview can be closed breaking in mid-March, Askey didn’t instantly present his opinion relating to the choice outdoors of a tweet he printed indicating his shock.
I’m clearly devastated to listen to this information which has come as a whole shock. I’m slightly misplaced for phrases at this level. #dpreview https://t.co/5rKjeksIJG
— Phil Askey (@philask) March 22, 2023
That modified this previous weekend when he took to LinkedIn to share his dissatisfaction with the choice to shut arguably the most important pictures useful resource on the planet.
“DPReview has 8,800 information articles, 1,300 opinions (together with 180+ video opinions), 160 opinion items, 160 interviews, 1,700+ pattern galleries virtually all created by DPReview employees stretching again to 1998,” he writes on LinkedIn.
“From the neighborhood, simply probably the most lively and passionate in any class there are over 47 million discussion board posts and the challenges system has over 1.1 million pictures. It’s the primary end result for any pictures associated search (and has been for nearly its whole life),” he continues.
“I actually hope that Andy Jassy can see what a waste tearing this staff aside and burning all this content material will probably be, and what an enormous loss it could be to the pictures neighborhood and the Web as a complete.”
Askey tags Jassy, Amazon’s present CEO, within the assertion, clearly indicating that he expects him to learn it.
Whereas not formally talked about within the announcement of the upcoming closure, PetaPixel discovered early on that Amazon’s plan was to first lock the location for an indeterminate period of time earlier than deleting it altogether.
“The location will probably be locked, with no additional updates made after April tenth 2023. The location will probably be accessible in read-only mode for a restricted interval afterwards,” DPReview’s discover reads. “You may request a obtain of all of the images and textual content you’ve uploaded to the location. This will probably be accessible till April sixth, after which we will be unable to finish the request.”
Whereas the corporate’s plan seems to nonetheless contain locking the location on April 10, it’s not clear if Amazon nonetheless intends to delete all of the content material. Even with out employees, DPReview‘s server prices are probably fairly excessive given the large quantity of picture knowledge that has been collected through the years. That stated, it’s all saved on servers that Amazon owns, which has led many to query why the corporate can’t simply proceed to let the content material dwell on.
Amazon has not made a public assertion on the matter.