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

The Anti-Amazon Alliance

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 419 posts

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#41

Post by tantalor »

koboll wrote: post #14

>as John Gruber put it on Daring Fireball, “Amazon isn’t hurting for revenue (especially now), but they are hurting for trust.” This is empirically false. Amazon is the second most-trusted brand in America . https://morningconsult.com/most-trusted-brands/ It's wild how easily SV types will tweet things like "No one trusts Amazon!" when the reality outside the Bay Area is so radically and demonstrably opposite.

Is this Simpon's paradox at work? Google is more trusted than Amazon in Gen-Z Adults, Millennials, and Gen-X, but overall Amazon beats Google. Google doesn't even make the top-25 of Boomers, but Amazon is #11. That's a little weird; does it explain the overall result?

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#42

Post by dsabanin »

seph-reed wrote: post #29
subhobroto wrote: post #21

Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot. The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bott…

> Jeff Bezos is not the monster here - he's just responding to market forces. Market forces are not moral. You don't get a free pass on your actions because you made a bunch of money.

The way different societies organize themselves is they tend to incentivize behavior that is beneficial to their continuation. Society who incentivizes non-beneficial behavior will eventually collapse and be replaced by a more fitting one.

If society is to give out free passes for suboptimal behavior to anyone, it's going to be to those who provide it the most value. Kind of like Amazon does to a lot of people right now.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#43

Post by subhobroto »

CPLX wrote: post #36
subhobroto wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Because Amazon has extreme market power and engages in predatory anti-competitive behavior Sure it does. The American consumer continues to empower it to behave that way because no one other than Amazon gives them what they need. Kind of like how people continue to complain about their cable provider being evil but they don't do anything about it except complain. Want to solve your cable provider being evil? Star…

It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for. The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.

> It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for.

Ah the "government" playbook.

Life does not work that way. If I want to affect change, I have to get the job done.

The "government" is you and I. There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.

How many of the people here complaining about Amazon being evil have even written a grievance letter to this "government" that is supposed to step in and stop Amazon from being evil?

People are voting with their wallets and they want cheap consumer products with a great return policy made by sweat shops delivered by people urinating into bottles barely making minimum wage after accounting for overhead.

Every single Amazon customer knows this and they don't care.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#44

Post by Infinitesimus »

javajosh wrote: post #26
softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

>other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality . Although…

It's about incentives here i think.

For Jobs-era Apple, your incentive is to make something Jobs liked and the only reason that worked was because Jobs had great taste (subjective ofc) and a strong vision of what he wanted.

Amazon is very very focused on outcomes and that's what incentives a lot of decisions. Being data-driven is a tool to understand and measure the outcomes and inform decisions.

Google from the outside may be data-driven but data-driven to do what?

Jobs wanted to make a great phone, amazon wants to be your everything store, Google wanted to organize the world's information but the company has far exceeded that original goal and it's not clear what they want to do now.

That's what we keep seeing products that seem to exist for their own sake in many companies imo and those products struggle to find footing and die with no learnings.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#45

Post by dllthomas »

subhobroto wrote: post #21

Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot. The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bott…

A contract killer is also responding to market forces. Sometimes people are willing to pay for things we don't want to allow them, and we judge (and punish) the people who provide them.

I'm not taking a position on monstrosity, or lack there of, but the reasoning provided seems flawed.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#46

Post by somethingwitty1 »

nxc18 wrote: post #13
wpietri wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree, but 3 is in abeyance right now; I'm getting faster delivery times from other places. And regarding 2, Amazon has been training me for a while (via slow-ship discounts and the Amazon Day thing) that I don't need everything right away. I don't know about everybody else, but that has definitely made it easier for me to try out other vendors.

I’m not sure what’s going on with Amazon recently, but they’ve on multiple occasions told me that an item won’t ship or arrive until well into May, only for it to turn up next day. (edit: this is over the last 3 weeks for context) I wonder how much of their slow delivery is them under promising and how much is them actually not being able to get things out in a day or two. None of the other vendors I’ve worked with,…

There was a giant banner at the top of their site that explained there was global health crisis and shipments of non-essentials could be delayed. They'd been asked (told in some cases) by governments and others to prioritize eseential product shipments, so they did. They also told suppliers to stop sending non-essentials for FBA. If they had capacity (and items on hand) they've been delivering non-essentials (I've gotten some of my stuff sooner too). There was a big article that blew up here about how France was going to fine them for shipping non-essentials/putting workers at risk and gave them 24 hours to change their entire warehouse workflow/technical systems (Amazon responded by saying they'd need to shutdown for a bit to avoid the fines as they reworked everything to comply).

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#47

Post by softwaredoug »

javajosh wrote: post #26
softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

>other orgs heavily micromanage or have structures that create more politics than value Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality . Although…

The problem is many executives think they are Steve Jobs. When in reality almost nobody is as visionary as Steve Jobs.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#48

Post by filoleg »

jes5199 wrote: post #32
softwaredoug wrote: post #4

As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…

have you talked to engineers who actually work at Amazon? they aren’t exactly running a tight ship. Market forces can make up for having a dysfunctional culture. This is roughly analogous to the role of luck in personal success- people say “I must have done something right!” when in reality you have far less control than you imagine

I have plenty of friends who are ex-Amazon engineers, and for all of their (valid) complaints about the place (management, incentive structure, culture, etc.), one thing no one has ever complained about was the efficiency and quality of Amazon’s engineering work. The stuff i heard about their internal build systems alone is straight up awe-inspiring, and that’s even compared to other tech giants (which is where i met most of the ex-Amazonians in the first place).

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#49

Post by SolaceQuantum »

softwaredoug wrote: post #25
zbobet2012 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…

Yeah I agree. A lot of large companies can invest deeply just to drive out their competition. WalMart famously did the same to drive out other businesses in the 90s and 00s. I think though we need to recognize that Amazon is succesful for a reason, and those reasons are why they are in a position to invent even deeper and more relentlessly...

I don’t think Amazon is inventing anything new in the space of driving out competition using a technique derived by gilded age industrial revolution

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#50

Post by subhobroto »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #39
subhobroto wrote: post #21

Amazon is successful because they allow people to order cheap consumer goods real fast, sometimes same day and have a great return policy to boot. The typical consumer does not care about "Made in U.S.A" vs "Made in China" vs "Made in Taiwan". They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. The typical consumer does not care whether the workers were paid fair wages and given enough bathroom breaks so as not to urinate in a bott…

>The typical consumer does not care whether the IP of a company was stolen and cheap copies were made that were defective and buggy compared to the original product. They do care whether it's $9 vs $27. People might not care if they are knowingly buying a counterfeit item, but they certainly do care if they think they are getting a legitimate brand name item and then receive a different (especially inferior) product.

> People might not care if they are knowingly buying a counterfeit item, but they certainly do care if they think they are getting a legitimate brand name item and then receive a different (especially inferior) product.

I personally would be very cautious if I saw a $1500 Gucci handbag on sale for $45 and expected it to be genuine.

Have I come across a $1500 Gucci handbag on sale for $45 and it was genuine? Yes, at an auction because a colleague of mine flips these as a side business.

Would this pricing be available retail? No.

If you're saying someone was sold a $1500 Gucci for $1500 and it turned out to be counterfeit - I feel for them.

Solution: Return it and file a chargeback if the seller does not take returns.

Post reply on HN