For the past couple of weeks (or maybe a little longer), I’ve been logging on to Amazon, through my saved bookmark for it, and ending up at a strange looking page that was nothing like what I was used to: it had far fewer images and less content, and navigating it was quite unintuitive. Just today, I tried to buy a book for Kindle using one-click, and I ended up at a page telling me I couldn’t do that. That was disturbing, as I’ve previously bought a lot of books that way. So I did some noodling around.
Eventually I came on a page with a link that invited me to sign onto Amazon through my desktop computer’s Web browser. So I did that, and I was back at my old familiar Amazon interface, which let me buy the e-book I wanted with no trouble. I promptly added that page to my list of bookmarks and put it into the bar of favorites at the top of the page, deleting the Amazon link that had been there.
What seems weird, though, is that Amazon must have changed where my established link took me, from a page designed to work with computers to a page designed to work with things like phones—even though I virtually never go to Amazon from any device except my desktop computer. Could they have just assumed that everyone uses phones as their primary interface and made the change without checking?