Amazon
Amazon’s first phone hasn’t been a hit. But it may not be quite the flop it appears, based on the Amazon Fire reviews on the online retailer’s own web site.
That’s because a good-sized chunk of the nearly 2,000 1-star pans of the device aren’t really reviews at all. They’re a form of protest, organized by the environmental group, Greenpeace.
Take Rachel Rubin’s October 24 review — the only one she’s ever penned using her Amazon.com account: “I can’t support a phone powered by dirty energy like coal and gas,” she writes.
In fact, Greenpeace says that the majority of Fire Phone’s dud reviews — more than 1,400 of them — are from environmentalists unhappy with the fact that Amazon’s massive cloud computing infrastructure is powered by coal and gas, rather than renewable energy sources.
In the data center industry, cheap power is king, and coal-and-gas-powered electricity is the cheapest. But over the past few years, Greenpeace has led a remarkably successful campaign, pressuring internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Apple to power their sprawling data centers with energy from solar arrays, biofuel, and wind-power.
The activists haven’t had much success with Amazon, however. About 15 percent of its data center requirements come from renewable energy. That’s enough to earn it an F grade in Greenpeace’s books.
So in late September, Greenpeace put a call out to its supporters, asking them to sign a petition calling for Amazon to use more renewable energy. “We also asked supporters who were Amazon.com customers with accounts if they would take an additional step, which was to review the Fire phone with a critique of the fact that its cloud-based technology is being powered primarily by dirty energy,” says David Pomerantz, a Greenpeace spokesman.
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