111–120 of 232 posts
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The Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive. It's much easier to leverage network effects to tie consumers to producers. Why make or build anything when you can control the market by controlling the app at the end of the distribution chain?
Wasn't the Internet supposed to eliminate the middleman?
Come here and the top discussion thread is about how little Priceline does, how they're "just middlemen", and that they don't add any value.
It's clear that HN (and techies as a whole, I assume) highly discounts the value of users, marketing, brand, and distribution.
Really is fascinating how different perspectives can be.
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It did when it comes to distribution channel. A hotel can have a website where people can directly book a room. But people want to compare prices, shops around, hence a new form of ... middleman :D
Yeah, and they these middlemen also give hotels a way to sell lesser service and blame the middleman. Going through the third-party often loses membership perks and amenities and generally also makes cancellation much harder, in exchange for a lesser rate. If the hotel offered the lesser rate themselves, they would effectively be pricing their "free" amenities, and they don't want to do that.
Generally they are paying around 20% of the booking fee to the listing service. So in theory the hotel would be able to charge 15% less on their own site and make a larger profit. But if they did they would no longer get listed on the popular sites where people go to easily price compare and then book.
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Wasn't the Internet supposed to eliminate the middleman?
It did when it comes to distribution channel. A hotel can have a website where people can directly book a room. But people want to compare prices, shops around, hence a new form of ... middleman :D
It's turtles all the way down.
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Why? My understanding was that the only reason Apple and Google did stock splits was that they wanted to get onto the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is (stupidly) price weighted and not market cap weighted so without the split, they would have been a much larger portion of the Dow.
To make it affordable and easier for more people to buy their stock. This is always the biggest reason for split. Will an average person invest in a stock which is trading at $2k per share? Nope.
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Booking.com is part of Priceline group
UK here, heard of it, never heard anyone mention it nor seen anything of it in traditional media however. Presumably they're a USA only company?
This is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?
From a different perspective Priceline is an outsourced, commission-only marketing & sales team that every airline, hotel and rental car company may participate in freely.
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I have a hard time with the idea that SpaceX sits somewhere around $12B and Tesla around $50B (with most people arguing even that is absurd). So to value Priceline at $100B is insanity.
Priceline has generated $7 billion in net income the prior three fiscal years combined. They may be overvalued, however they blatantly are providing an extremely valuable service. And if it were easy to replace or compete with (ie something of low actual value), the airlines etc would have already cut out Priceline and would keep the $2+ billion in annual profit for themselves (they've tried and failed repeatedly to…
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I'm guessing he doesn't really need the money at this point, especially given his age.
I really don't understand this line of thinking. Are old people incapable of spending money? Is what they chose to do with capital of less consequence? Even if they do have one foot in the grave, they have a right to legacy.
Plus, he's Kirk. He can still get the public's attention when he wants to.
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He sold his shares at a very low price a long time ago
So he "only" made $600m. Although apparently the numbers are disputed. Heck, even 1/10th of that is a tidy sum.