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Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

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Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#141

Post by treehau5 »

njitram wrote: post #80
tuna-piano wrote: post #25

Amazon's rationale for its lack of profits is well known... Why does this rationale not apply to its cloud business? Is the cloud business so good that it generates profits regardless of the investment it makes... or is the retail business so bad that it can't generate profits regardless of the investment AMZN makes in it?

The switching cost for retail is really low; one Google and you know where you can get the same product for a potential lower price. This means that to win in the retail business you have to accept incredible low margins or even periodically a loss. Online retail is almost a 'perfect' market. While with hosting, it isn't as easy to switch. When you have chosen AWS, of course you can switch to another vendor, but that…

I would argue the exact opposite, but it's because it's not only just the product, but also the customer service and experience.

Switching from Amazon to a similar service is a huge risk to me. Will I get the same customer service when I order something and it comes shattered at my door? Can I rely on two day shipping being really 2 days? (I know some people here are whining about it being 3, the majority of us get it within 2, sometimes 1) Can I trust the reviews on the other sites? Will they know my preferences and suggest me other items or books as well as Amazon or are they coercing me? Do I get the same value added from the "premium" subscription such as Prime? Who knows.

Switching cloud providers? A snap, provided you have architected your systems according and not treated AWS offerings as black boxes and understand "OK I am using RDS, I can just switch to another MySQL provider easy enough" and prepared accordingly. "Ok I am using Elasticache, time for Redis." I imagine it's even easier if you stuck to containers. And unlike Amazon retail where there really isn't an online store that can match it in terms of customer service and experience, many would argue that a DigitalOcean or similar have better customer service, so there is competition there.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#142

Post by dredmorbius »

aninhumer wrote: post #129
dredmorbius wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the business model. All of these behaviors 1) are hostile to high-quality accessble content and 2) are fundamentally driven by advertising (or its failure). Information is a public good. This doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce (the contrary), but high-quality public information has a high positive externality to the common wealth (that is, the commonwealth), and is essential in a democratic socie…

>micropayments. I disagree strongly, see Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Hal Varian as to why not. So my initial reaction to their arguments was that none of their complaints matter as long as it's cheap enough. The fact that my water is metered doesn't make me anxious about usage, because it's too cheap to care. But of course, that's because water is fungible. I have no fear that the water company is going to start sen…

History says it matters.

Make the individual item payments small enough, and quite literally, it isn't worth my time to have to decide on the value. You see, transaction costs matter, and the actual price paid itself is a very small component. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs

Again: the amount of money necessary to eliminate advertising completely is all but inconsequential. The frictions, costs, inefficiencies, and negative externalities of fractional-mill per-page costs would be stupidly inefficient.

E.g., I can read ~50-100 web pages/day. That's, roughly, 36,000 pages, tops, per year, or $0.002 per page. Should I really have to decide one hundred times a day if a page was worth reading?

And to what end?

If I'm broke enough that that's a concern, then there's a tremendous social inequity in denying me the information.

If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this. I don't care, literally, it isn't worth my time, and I'm subsidising access for the poor in my own country and around the world.

My whole point is that markets and information are exceptionally poorly suited. I've considered your arguments and rejected them.

Water, incidentally, is another case where the infrastructure, that is, fixed costs hugely outweight the marginal costs of delivery in most cases.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#143

Post by ycombobreaker »

laxatives wrote: post #29
DasIch wrote: post #10

Is there any reason why Amazon would suddenly "waste" money on profit? Could this be an indication of a change in strategy or is this just a temporary thing?

There should eventually be some time when Amazon does finally cash out, presumably on some timeline as a function of Bezos's mortality. Its unrealistic to be around forever. How many companies last hundreds of years? How many tech companies last decades?

Microsoft is 40 years old. IBM is 100. Some other old companies might not be considered "tech" anymore, but only because their market/product are better defined (e.g. Ford is an auto maker, but the assembly line and the concept of an automobile itself place Ford as the "tech" darling of 110 years ago, IMHO). I think if you don't see old tech companies today, it's because over time their public appearance has quietly lost the "how" (new technology, automation) and only left the "what" (search, ipods, advertising, rockets). But that doesn't mean old tech companies die.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#144

Post by manigandham »

Quinner wrote: post #134
paulddraper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So....block ad blockers and HN screams. "I will pay for content", they say. "I just don't like your 25MB flash ads." Link to crap, and HN screams. "Is journalism dead? This stuff is just click bait. I appreciate good writing and quality content." Put up a paywall and HN screams. "Why u make me pay?!?!?!?"

I work for a publisher. I appreciate quality content. This is a rehashed press release, I shouldn't be expected to pay for it.

Facts are cheap/easy but its still content and you should be expected to pay for it (either via ads or subscriptions). Nothing is free.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#145

Post by plicense »

hokuriku wrote: post #110

You know what this means, right? Jeff Bezos will increase investment into AWS and Blue Origin, while not investing anything into improving engineer work-life balance. Seriously, at least cover MSP and transit! Even partially covering a transit pass would be nice! Sincerely, an Amazon Vancouver SDE I

Woah you're in Vancouver? If you don't mind me asking, what does the pay package look like?

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#146

Post by manigandham »

tracker1 wrote: post #111
dredmorbius wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, this doesn't address publishing's revenue problem, though it does the public good element. See my earlier comment.

Serve first-party ads that integrate well with your content, and establish direct relationships with your advertisers... same as print has done for over a century.

This does not scale and has been proven over and over again. Print never made much money and they had both subscriptions and advertising together to help.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#147

Post by aninhumer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #142
aninhumer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>micropayments. I disagree strongly, see Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Hal Varian as to why not. So my initial reaction to their arguments was that none of their complaints matter as long as it's cheap enough. The fact that my water is metered doesn't make me anxious about usage, because it's too cheap to care. But of course, that's because water is fungible. I have no fear that the water company is going to start sen…

History says it matters. Make the individual item payments small enough, and quite literally, it isn't worth my time to have to decide on the value . You see, transaction costs matter, and the actual price paid itself is a very small component. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs Again: the amount of money necessary to eliminate advertising completely is all but inconsequential. The frictions, costs, in…

>Should I really have to decide one hundred times a day if a page was worth reading?

No, and the argument I was suggesting is that if the costs were low enough, no one would really need to make those decisions, any more than they need to decide whether running a glass of water is worth the cost.

>If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this.

Why? If a micropayment system worked well enough that no one cared about the prices, what reason would there be to involve the government?

(Not that I'm averse to such a scheme, I just think you're making a strange leap of logic here.)

> I've considered your arguments and rejected them.

It feels like you just read my first sentence, and reacted to that, despite the fact the rest of my comment argues against that position, and ultimately agrees with you (although from a slightly different direction).

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#148

Post by temp20160423 »

serge2k wrote: post #39
mabbo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee stock vesting day. If you get stocks granted as a bonus (most of us do), they vest in may and November. I know guys who've never sold any of their stocks. This will be literally $10k or more in their pockets, if they finally decide to sell.

> If you get stocks granted as a bonus (most of us do), Or by bonus do you mean just the amounts they give you as regular refreshes?

AMZN doesn't give cash bonuses; the RSU refreshes are treated like a bonus that pay-off in the future

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#149

Post by givehimagun »

jonhohle wrote: post #14
gist wrote: post #3

AWS currently improves product and cuts prices. My feeling is that as they mature over time and get even more of a lock on the market (and their customers) with the obvious lock in they have that will reverse and prices will increase over time resulting in even more profit than they reported today. Impossible to think this won't happen, especially with the differentiation they have with their product as well as the F…

One significant advantage of AWS is that they have a very large, built-in retail customer with relatively demanding requirements. I've always been under the impression that Microsoft doesn't really have a business that would lend itself to consuming its own services[0] and it's unclear to me whether or not Google uses their stuff internally. 0 - as an anecdote, I recall their salesmen coming to sell my employer their…

Azure dumped its internal caching product in 2014 and switched to Redis.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/lap-around-azure-redi...

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#150

Post by MicroBerto »

_lce0 wrote: post #115
fabrice_d wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's even available in the page as a link: " rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon-reports-surge-in-prof... That's a call for a browser extension!

No need for a browser extension, just throw this into your ~/.js var ampLink = document.querySelector('link[rel="amphtml"]'); if (ampLink) { var href = ampLink.getAttribute('href'); if (href) { location.replace(href, false); } } EDIT: woa! this works really wall ;)

Interesting - What browser / OS is that file meant for?
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