131–140 of 440 posts
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It’s not like treasuries or money market return acceptable returns for people’s retirement portfolio.
What is an "acceptable" return? No one has a right to achieve any particular return.
I really wish the author had sensed the limits of his argument, because I think the point he's trying to make is basically correct. He's just stretching it to the breaking point by invoking Amazon and the subprime crisis. If he'd left the stretch goals out of it, it would have stood as a perfect foil to the avalanche of "meta-meta-meta analysis of everything except where the money's gonna come from" in the Stratecher…
I can't recommend the Stratechery piece enough (or Stratechery in general).
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Defending those of poor character and moral fiber (not my judgement, facts reported) from a jab about their clothes is low priority. The other issues presented are far more pressing.
You presume to tell others how to arrange their priorities? Very well. I will say that you are wrong. It is a fine priority to defend people from unfair jabs and accusations. These attacks damage the quality of our public discourse, which is in bad enough shape already. You will find no shortage of fair jabs and meaningful accusations to be aired in the matter of WeWork. They are scathing enough on their own. Random…
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> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
Volume. Lose on every sale but make up for it with volume. :-)
While the writer is a irritating in how he presents info, he does have good points. WeWork never looked like a real business to me, I thought the IPO as presented was such a great work of fiction. In the end the "business" is renting office space. It's not worth any more than that. At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones, I guess you could think of that as not terribly new) but it did…
> At least Uber and Lyft provide something new (calling taxis from phones) It's less than that—they provide the ability to call taxis from an app . You've been able to call taxis from phones for significantly longer, you just had to dial a number. I know this isn't a common way to call taxis everywhere, but it was in some locations. I went to college in a small-ish city called Saratoga Springs. If you wanted a taxi,…
It's likely not true for all areas or countries but here Uber provided so much better experience that I would use it even if it was more expensive. It's the best thing that ever happened to taxi customers here as now many other players implemented apps with similar features to Uber. Even if they go bust I will remember them for making my life much better.
> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…
> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
Once big (and profitable) enough, you can also just buy out any threatening competitor.
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Taking a jab at clothing generally is so low effort to be actually embarrassing and will invalidate anything else that you are trying to say. IMO.
I'm amazed that the focus is on the author calling a t-shirt "ill-fitting" instead of calling Neumann a liar and a thief. Apparently, Neumann's fashion sense is more defensible than his personal integrity.
You take issue with this?
> WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses. > This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs coul…
> with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly I don't understand...if you undercut your competitors so you're the sole survivor, I don't see how profiting is a obvious end result. When you return prices to market value wouldn't competitors just appear again. Is predatory pricing really such a bad thing, I'd assume the market would just corrects itself later?
No, because at this point the barrier to entry is substantial. And, if a competitor does come in, the incumbent with a huge warchest can just drop the price again temporarily to drive them out.
> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is false. First, Amazon is far from controlling the whole market. They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Second, Amazon didn't predatory price, or if it did, it didn't for long, certainly not long enough to achieve its current m…
> AWS revenue came accounted for 13% of Amazon’s total revenue. Of Amazon’s total $3.1 billion in operating income, 52% came from AWS. [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/25/aws-earnings-q2-2019.html
> This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. This is false. First, Amazon is far from controlling the whole market. They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Second, Amazon didn't predatory price, or if it did, it didn't for long, certainly not long enough to achieve its current m…
> They control close to 50% of e-commerce which itself represents less than 12% of total retail sales. Both of these numbers are surprising to me, can you source them? Particularly the first one, which I assume is a global measure, and I'd be interested to know what % of North American e-commerce Amazon controls. I wager I could walk outside my home and ask 100 people on the sidewalk to name one e-commerce site and f…
Unless you count, like, Walmart. Basically everyone else has some kind of niche. Amazon sells everything.