Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon • Hacker News Board

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#71

Post by cmurf » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

Ship avocados green and they survive, but aren't ripe the day of delivery, or until 2-3 days later. Ship them almost ripe so that they arrive ripe, and they will be bruised and nasty, unless they pack them in an avocado sleeve that keeps them from rolling around.

Done right, it has the potential to be a better avocado experience, because so many morons molest avocados, digging their grubby fingers into them and bruising the poor thing. And it's the next person who can't see this who buys the bruised avocado. All those brown spots in an avocado? Those are finger squeezes. Stop avocado rape!

There's a lot of problems with shipping produce direct to customer, sight unseen, and maybe a few benefits. But I gotta say even 10 years ago Fresh Direct in NYC was doing a genius job of it.

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#72

Post by ameister14 » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

amagumori wrote: post #30

fennecfoxen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage regulation is capitalist? Sounds pretty central-planning to me.

i agree! in fact, you know what would be a really efficient form of capitalism? what if we just eliminated wage regulation, and the marginal costs of workers to our business entirely, by making them slaves!

I don't understand - are you being sarcastic or do you actually believe that slavery is an efficient capitalist state?

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#73

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 4:40 PM UTC

arvidkahl wrote: post #3

Amazon 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…

>"Amazon has found their way to cornering the one property that is not influenced by fashions and whims: scarcity."

What do you mean by this? What exactly is scarce?

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#74

Post by dokument » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:00 PM UTC

frogfuzion wrote: post #35

starstorm312 wrote: post #34

Interestingly, the article suggested that Amazon, in being both the distributor and the cloud provider, may be able to increase their advantage by exploiting information they hold on competitors.

Certainly just the simple ability to see which accounts are scaling up or down and spending metrics can provide a huge business edge right?

Maybe. Still wouldn't be as much as google knows. Via android phone locations, apps installed, what people are saying in email/gchat/gvoice conversations, google home histories, youtube, etc. Not mentioning their other services like google cloud.

It would be very easy to use that data to know when and with who to invest.

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#75

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

skookum wrote: post #61

bryanlarsen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS was built to host Amazon. Sure, it was a public facing service first , but AFAICT Amazon.com was always the primary target customer, and probably still is. AWS was built based on the needs and experience for hosting Amazon.com.

The experience of hosting and scaling Amazon may have informed some early AWS thinking but AWS was not built specifically to host Amazon and Amazon was never the primary target customer. This is evidenced by nothing more so than by the fact that despite Amazon's prescriptive initiative to move to AWS being well over 5 years in[1], much of retail & digital still runs on Oracle, dedicated HW, and bespoke internal servi…

When you work on a product that has both internal and external customers, there are two possibilities:

- the external customers get priority because they're real customers that pay real money.

- the internal customers get priority either because they're the "real" business of the company or because they have the right connections

Amazon uses a very tiny fraction of AWS, but I'm willing to bet that their bug reports and feature requests are accorded a fairly high priority.

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#76

Post by sqeaky » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #73

arvidkahl wrote: post #3

Amazon 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…

>"Amazon has found their way to cornering the one property that is not influenced by fashions and whims: scarcity." What do you mean by this? What exactly is scarce?

Anything that Amazon can move from an area of lesser scarcity.

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#77

Post by asdf8565 » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

nitemice wrote: post #20

stirlo wrote: post #5

Ben 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.

This is a really amazing and clever idea on Amazon's part: Taking a system or technology that you've already built and are maintaining, and make it accessible to others as a platform. Then continue using that platform as if you were a/the best customer. They did it with AWS, they've done it with their retail business, and now they're probably going to do it with AmazonFresh/WholeFoods. It makes a lot of sense, and it…

IMO, the biggest/best companies are the one's that take run of the mill daily business expenses and turn them into money makers.

Google needed email to run it's business. They built a customer facing service around it.

Computing answers is their thing. With their machine learning cloud services, anyone can compute answers for their complex problems.

Companies that stagnate tend to iterate, with little to show for it, on a few "core" products.

While they're too big to collapse altogether, I'd put Oracle, MS, Yahoo, and numerous others in that group.

Possibly Facebook. They're no where near as diversified as Amazon or Google. If the bottom falls out on buying eyeballs, they're in for a world of hurt.

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#78

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:21 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #76

bogomipz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Amazon has found their way to cornering the one property that is not influenced by fashions and whims: scarcity." What do you mean by this? What exactly is scarce?

Anything that Amazon can move from an area of lesser scarcity.

Sorry, I'm still not understanding. Could you give a concrete example of this with Amazon?

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#79

Post by ZoeZoeBee » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #69

stirlo wrote: post #5

Ben 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.

He's basically saying that Amazon is a big logistics company. Except he calls it meat as a service. It's an interesting take. But it is also how many analysts thought that Walmart would kill grocery stores. I personally don't think that Amazon will fare much better than Walmart... shopping for groceries is fundamentally harder online, and Amazon hasn't demonstrated any magic that makes that easier.

Wal-Mart is killing grocery stores, Wal-Mart's grocery accounts for almost 53 percent of overall revenue.

There has been a large amount of food deflation over the past few years, the nation's largest Grocer Kroger cites Wal-Mart as a large contributing factor to this. http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-is-cutting-prices-201...

Grocers margins are already razor thin, have you been paying attention to Kroger's stock price

Re: Conglomerates Didn’t Die, They Look Like Amazon

#80

Post by sqeaky » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

cylinder wrote: post #59

indigochill wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indu…

Youre exactly right, I compare job ads in the US vs another country all the time. The US job ads have such absurd expectations and requirements, and demonstrate a total lack of any holistic approach to hiring, even for junior jobs. The companies come off as arrogant and entitled in their writing, even for areas which supposedly have shortages (eyeroll). The job ads overseas are much less rigid and more flexible. I of…

I wonder how much of the "requirements" in jobs notices are required. I have gotten several contracts while missing some of the key items they wanted. I have also seen ridiculous things like when DHH, the inventor of rails, couldn't get a job because he didn't have enough years of rails experience.

All but the dumbest recruiters know that a huge amount of people filling their roles are liars and I say this as a contractor. Just like any other group of people some contractors and recruiters are great and some are garbage. When garbage recruiters make garbage demands they get garbage contractors.