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The Anti-Amazon Alliance

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Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#61

Post by xenocyon »

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…

These sound like platitudes. And in particular the claim of Amazon's tremendous autonomy for workers doesn't even ring true to me (though I could be wrong since I'm basing this on anecdotal conversations with Amazon engineers).

I think there are real, deterministic reasons why Amazon is successful (other than its unscrupulous practices) but I'm not sure your comment adequately covers them. It's hard to make these determinations post hoc because they are not easily falsifiable.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#62

Post by harajuku »

dsabanin wrote: post #42
seph-reed wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, you've just swallowed the marketspeak to the point where you think that societies are actively favoring rational net benefits over short-term, destructive cashouts. Calling unethical behavior on a massive scale "suboptimal" and smoothing over the fallout doesn't make you sound smart and analytical, it means you're not thinking hard enough.

Societies organize themselves and collapse all the time--what exactly makes Amazon beneficial to the continuation of our own? It would be beneficial to think critically about what goes on inside.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#63

Post by ardy42 »

subhobroto wrote: post #34
CPLX wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all fine and perhaps valid, but it's not a serious conversation until you add this at the top: - Because Amazon has extreme market power and engages in predatory anti-competitive behavior

> - 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…

> 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? Start a cheap WISP. Anyone can do it, yet no one does.

> Complaining is cheap. It takes a lot of work to actually do something.

That "answer" elides so many problems that it smells strongly of BS:

* Most people who complain about their cable company barely have the technical capability to set up their own router, let alone run an ISP.

* Even a small ISP would require thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars of equipment, very few people have that kind of money laying around to fund a quixotic endeavor like that.

* The person who runs such an ISP will probably have to deal with a significant administrative burden, including things like child porn investigations. The smaller the ISP the more likely the police are to treat the operator as a suspect himself.

* Even if someone's willing to deal with all of the above, they'd still have to sign up their neighbors. It's unlikely many of them are Sancho Panzas.

* etc.

The solution to most monopolies and other over-concentrations of market power isn't small-fry consumers attempting to compete with them directly; that idea doesn't even pass the smell test. The actual solution is some kind of government regulatory action, and the complaining you deride is part of the process to (possibly) make that happen.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#64

Post by [deleted] »

tinyhouse wrote: post #3

Good article. There are a few unknowns still. 1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amaz…

[deleted]

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#65

Post by breischl »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #44
javajosh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 outs…

>Google [is] data-driven to do what?

Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#66

Post by siruncledrew »

tinyhouse wrote: post #3

Good article. There are a few unknowns still. 1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amaz…

Amazon is really good at being the ‘signal gateway’ in between inputs and outputs. Whether it is ecommerce or AWS. They take care of everything in the middle that many people don’t think about.

Investing heavily in logistics connected to transactions is what made Amazon excel over Walmart, Target, UPS, Fedex, etc. How many companies setting out in online commerce have the amount of backbone infrastructure as Amazon?

The closest I can think of is Taobao/Alibaba.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#67

Post by poxrud »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #11
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…

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…

>>Amazon is killing video encoding business by selling a negative margin video encoder to sell through AWS compute.

What product are you referring to? I'm in this industry and based on my experience their video encoding+storage+streaming offerings are actually higher priced than their competitors. The reason their services are popular is the integration with the rest of AWS (which is true for most of their offerings).

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#68

Post by dylan604 »

freeopinion wrote: post #51
tinyhouse wrote: post #3

Good article. There are a few unknowns still. 1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amaz…

Using Amazon for reviews seems ironic to me. Product reviews highlight Amazon's single biggest weakness: trust. You can't trust any Amazon review. Many of Amazon's other failings also center around trust.

You can't trust Amazon. period. full stop. Their reviews are total shite, that's for sure. However, you can't trust their product listings either that you'll actually receive what you thought you purchased.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#69

Post by tracer4201 »

dllthomas wrote: post #45
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.

Are you saying Amazons business model is comparable to someone who murders people for a living?

Lol what?

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#70

Post by clairity »

nitrogen wrote: post #20
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…

If they really are dumping, then I look forward to the lawsuit from all of their would-be competitors. That would help the increasingly centralized industry figure out what can be independent and what can only be done by monopolies.

> "...what can only be done by monopolies."

nothing requires a monopoly. monopolies are manipulative (cross-)market distortions.

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