This is clearly an April fools campaign. This approach is simply not the most viable. How many buttons are you going to have in your household? How are you going to protect it from kids etc!
Are you willing to bet it's an April Fools' joke? If you're not willing to bet, you don't really believe in it. I'll wager $200 against your $20 that it's not an April Fool's joke.
Before you give me your money, consider:
* You can have as many buttons as you want. They want you to have as many buttons as you can have. They have hooks and adhesive, which means you can basically have a button physically on every product that needs to be replaced. Your toilet paper holder can have a button. Your shower can have a button for shampoo and conditioner. Your mirror can have five buttons on it. Personally, I would fucking love for my house to be covered with buttons that I can just push to get things sent to me. That's the future I want.
* The button generates a notification on your phone and doesn't respond to subsequent presses, so you can cancel the order on your phone if your kids press the button. But the real solution here is to not have children. The world is overpopulated enough, and with the money you save by not having kids, you can just get more stuff from amazon. Which would you rather have: A new gaming PC, iPad, and iPhone every year, or some brat that won't appreciate you, won't call you more than once a month after you spend the best years of your life trying to raise them into a halfway decent person and failing because their snot-nosed friends ruin them, and keeps asking for money? The choice is obvious.
You had me convinced at 'real solution is to not have children'. While this is a compelling social message, I don't believe Amazon would knowingly, consciously, commit to such a message.
If it's an April Fools', think it'll be announced as such in a month? Willing to take $200 of my money risking only $20 of your own to put a stake in that belief?
If you won't even risk the price of four Starbucks coffees on your belief, do you really have it?
What's a better approach for in-the-moment, one-touch ordering of household necessities? I'm sure Amazon would like to hear your idea.
> How many buttons are you going to have in your household?
However many you would like. Sorta depends on what kind of products you'd like to buy in this manner. That's kinda the point.
> How are you going to protect it from kids
First of all, children are short. Put the buttons out of their reach. Second -- these are incredibly boring buttons that order boring things and provide no immediate pleasure or feedback. Kids don't crawl around on top of washing machines looking for buttons to press because washing machines are boring. Also you get a notification when you order something, so a kid smashing it is easily reversed. Common sense works fine here.
(Also, lots and lots of people don't have kids, or have kids old enough that they're not going to press a button to order laundry detergent willy-nilly, etc.)
The real solution is a family robot that monitors consumption of household items in a smart home and orders everything that you need in a timely manner.
The world is moving towards connected homes, connected cars, connected fridges etc, why the hell would you want individual stick on buttons, that would be silly.
I think IBM has a problem in that, as a company, they do not know how to sell to smaller fish. Chances are that you already have a relationship with IBM or a vendor, and that is how you get information on new products or upgrades.
My guess is that $5k / year for a product does not "move the needle" to reach sales quotas. Therefore, there is no incentive to talk to small shops.
