Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 195 posts

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#181

Post by bsbechtel »

cs702 wrote: post #138

The most interesting tidbit for me is that Amazon would have reported losses without AWS. The AWS business generated $2.6B in revenues in the fourth quarter, which is only 9% of Amazon's total revenues of $29.1B; but operating income for the AWS business was $607M, or 118% of company-wide net income of $513M.[1] Without AWS, Amazon would have reported losses! [1] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW5…

So does Shopify or other e-shop services run on AWS? If so, doesn't that essentially mean Amazon's competitors are paying Amazon to undercut them?

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#182

Post by nxzero »

logn wrote: post #139
nxzero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By variation, do you mean a clone. If so, that's not what I mean, I mean that the site is open source, community is able to make pull requests, and it's a community driven resource, that driven by content, code and community, not an singular interface.

By variation I mean HN is based on http://arclanguage.org/install ... I don't know how much the code bases have diverged. They do have an API: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api

Yes, ARC is a great example of how a PG project should be open sourced and run by the community.

__

API is read-only; API should be "full service" and the first interface to HN, not a supplement.

___

Yeah, whole ARC (aka PG) thing is an issue too; FYI, those install direction are dated, here's the info: http://arclanguage.org/user?id=akkartik

PG doesn't even appear to be actively involved in ARC anymore: http://arclanguage.org/user?id=pg

Find it hard to believe if YC funded a startup like HN that they wouldn't require an explanation of why ARC made sense as the language of choice.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#183

Post by rahimnathwani »

kuschku wrote: post #170
richmarr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to you reach that conclusion from those numbers?

Because that’s literally what they say? Amazon’s physical stores and Amazon’s online retail business are not profitable. They are selling below price. This is per definition predatory pricing. They are only able to offset this because AWS is making more profit. This is evident if you just look at the numbers.

That's not the definition of predatory pricing. Predatory pricing is setting prices low in the short term, in order to drive out competitors, so as to increase prices through market power. It has nothing to do with the level of overall profits. Profitable businesses can engage in predatory pricing, and unprofitable businesses can charge high and uncompetitive prices.

Your other point about AWS profits allowing losses in the retail business is incorrect. Profit is an accounting measure. A business with positive (even large) profits can run out of cash. A business with negative profits (losses) can operate for a long time, e.g. if it has raised cash by issuing equity or bonds, or if it is generating cash by selling off capital assets.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#184

Post by rahimnathwani »

matt4077 wrote: post #173
Arnt wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's correct but it's not evident from the numbers. The numbers can be acceptably explained by expansion, which Amazon does all the time. For example Amazon is just investing in a new retail business in India.

Investments don't actually diminish profits. If Amazon buys a house for 10mill$, their profit doesn't change by a cent, because while they may have less cash, they also own a 10mill$ building. The value of investments is spread out over whatever is reasonable for the category (i. e.: Building: 10 years or so, car: 3 or 4 years, javascript framework: 8 hours).

Investments do usually diminish profits in the year in which they're incurred. If Amazon buys a $1000 laptop for one of their engineers, in the middle of the year, and they depreciate it over 2 years, then $250 will be charged to the depreciation account in the current year, reducing profits by that amount.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#185

Post by _lce0 »

MicroBerto wrote: post #150
_lce0 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Firefox: https://github.com/rlr/dotjs-addon

Chrome: https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#186

Post by sangnoir »

coldcode wrote: post #180
kimcheekumquat wrote: post #2

update: after hour currently at 675.01. Price increase +73.01 (12.13%)

With a market cap of half of Apple's they made ... 1/20 of the profit. For the first time ever.

what are the growth prospects for Apple vs. Amazon? Market cap is influenced by speculators who want to buy low and sell high, and to them - the bigger the growth prospects, the better.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#187

Post by chatmasta »

chatmasta wrote: post #79
fgonzag wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't touch any Google product that my business critically depended on with a 10 foot pole. Their non existent customer service, willingness to kill products if it does not meet their user or revenue expectations, among many other things. It's a good strategy for them, but bad for their consumers.

My experience with GCE customer service has been < 10 minute replies.

Strange to see 8 upvotes 16 hours after I posted this... are some googlers out there on an upvote spree? :)

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#188

Post by tracker1 »

manigandham wrote: post #146
tracker1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty much bullocks... Print media costs massively more for publishing costs vs. online publishing. Same wrt television, both of which handle upwards of millions of customers every day just fine.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#189

Post by Johnny555 »

nopzor wrote: post #162
Johnny555 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to own a whole datacenter to own machines located in a datacenter, my company keeps machines in a 4 rack cage in a datacenter. (and plans to empty that cage by the time our contract runs out in September to finish the migration to AWS). Our AWS bill is just a bit higher than what we were paying for the cage rental + internet connectivity alone.

That doesn't sound possible. Are you saying your raw bill for _just_ colo (ie. space and power) and bandwidth (ie. IP transit) was less than your _entire_ AWS bill? I've never heard of anyone take such an extreme stance.

The 4 rack cage plus extra power plus redundant network at a Tier I datacenter costs us close to $6K/month (including some block of remote hands hours). Even at our peak we didn't have the racks full, allowed room for expansion. Note that this cost includes only coloc costs, not server or network leases/purchases.

We have very bursty traffic and run our baseload of ~ 30 severs (mostly m4.larges, with a few smaller utility servers as well as larger servers for back end services) most of the time, but when we need to scale, we ramp up to about 2 - 4 times that, but usually only for a few hours at a time. We also do some batch processing that takes a few high-memory servers for about a day each week.

We monitor costs pretty closely and our monthly AWS spend is still less than the coloc fees, and we are much more scalable now and have multi-datacenter (AZ) redundancy, and by the end of the year, we will have a cold spare in a second region (which will cost us very little since it will be mostly powered off)

We no longer need to vastly over-provision servers to handle our peak load and batch processing needs.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#190

Post by discodave »

Will_Do wrote: post #19
mason55 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they build cloud agnostic software that treats providers as a utility It's like browsers all over again. As long as each provider is offering different things or different implementations of the same thing we will either need to choose one or be forced to go through a lowest common denominator translation layer. MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN are all smart enough to not turn this into a race to the bottom of who can provide…

I think you're right in that Amazon Machine Learning and Azure Machine Learning will never be drop-in replacements for eachother. However, I would argue that VPSs are already drop-in replacements and I bet (though I have no proof) that VPSs are the majority of the market. The cloud providers may not have a viable way to provide even the perception of vendor lock-in when it comes to VPSs. Now it could be that prices a…

Even bigger than VPS is storage, which is the closest thing you will get to a commodity/drop in replacement in the cloud.

It was recently reported that Apple was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on S3 (before they switched). I think it's safe to assume that a couple of billion dollars of AWS revenue is cheap commodity storage.... which has low switching costs.

Post reply on HN