Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
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Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#2Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#3Amazon has found their way to cornering the one property that is not influenced by fashions and whims: scarcity. Both in a logistical and economical sense, they have been pushing the envelop on all corporate levels, from AWS to fresh produce.
To me, most of the "new and more agile" companies are cargo-culting the optimization paradigm, focussing on time-saving and convenience as if the more basic needs were already met. In that case, they are fighting for customer attention because the customer has attention to spare. Amazon however moved so deeply into the consciousness of the household (and, on HN, our work environments) that people are perfectly fine with Amazon being a conglomerate - since they literally deliver. Heh.
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#4Amazon has found their way to cornering the one property that is not influenced by fashions and whims: scarcity. Both in a logistical and economical sense, they have been pushing the envelop on all corporate levels, from AWS to fresh produce. To me, most of the "new and more agile" companies are cargo-culting the optimization paradigm, focussing on time-saving and convenience as if the more basic needs were already m…
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Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#5Ben Thompson has a great take on this... https://stratechery.com/2017/amazons-new-customer/
Essentially amazon develops services and buys the best customer for said services to ensure they get used.
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#6While prices are low, another aim of governments should be to keep wages high enough to maintain a standard of living. I think the fear around Amazon isn't that it is going to all of a sudden raise the price of goods from Whole Foods, but that they will reverse the employee friendly aspects of the company. When prices are low but wages aren't high enough to guarantee that people can take advantage of those lower prices, inequality is exacerbated.
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#7>The conglomerate was supposed to be dead, a relic of a bygone of era of corporate America.
That's not even close to being true. How does someone get a job on a supposedly reputable newspaper writing such daft shit?
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#8While prices are low, another aim of governments should be to keep wages high enough to maintain a standard of living. I think the fear around Amazon isn't that it is going to all of a sudden raise the price of goods from Whole Foods, but that they will reverse the employee friendly aspects of the company. When prices are low but wages aren't high enough to guarantee that people can take advantage of those lower pric…
> another aim of governments should be to keep wages high enough to maintain a standard of living
Disagree. The aim of government should be to enable the elimination of every single job while also enforcing a fair distribution of wealth. Wage regulation is a traditional capitalist approach to solving this problem. There are other approaches which might need to be tried in the coming decades..
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#9I don't know what the fetish is with Amazon. The article is ridiculous in suggesting Amazon putting Walmart out of business when it only started making real money in 2016. Amazon made $2B in 2016 and $0.6B in 2015, lost $0.2B in 2014. Walmart made $13B last year... but the article says Amazon is the one with the better mouse trap and "impervious to the natural life cycle of a conglomerate"? huh?
With the toxic culture, Amazon is going to go Uber someday. The Whole Foods acquisition is probably the start of Amazon taking a step too far.
Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon
#10While prices are low, another aim of governments should be to keep wages high enough to maintain a standard of living. I think the fear around Amazon isn't that it is going to all of a sudden raise the price of goods from Whole Foods, but that they will reverse the employee friendly aspects of the company. When prices are low but wages aren't high enough to guarantee that people can take advantage of those lower pric…
There is another side of that which I've noticed as an American expat. If one country or industry decides to keep wages high, there are at least two effects.
1. The minimum required experience is also increased. You see this in industries where it's very difficult for new blood to break into because the minimum required experience/skill level is above an "entry level" position because the pay expectations of the industry require a certain degree of skill and experience going in.
2. Companies outsource. They seek to maximize profits, which means reducing costs, which means paying those with low demands for work that's good enough.
I actually moved out of the US for work because I found that I had better opportunities outside the US than in it. Not higher-paying (those would be in the US), but opportunities to build work experience from nothing, which I didn't see an option for in the US as a fresh college grad with a journalism degree looking to break into software engineering. I've been working outside the US for ~3 years now and although there have been challenges it's changed my life and career for the better. YMMV.