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

91–100 of 419 posts

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#91

Post by three_seagrass »

wpietri wrote: post #7
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…

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.

Precisely. I don't know when the switch happened but Amazon seems to be using their own drivers to deliver and not Fedex.

The delivery quality is worse than bad, and has lead to us getting boxes stolen because Amazon drivers dump them at the quickest most convenient place for them - like Amazon drivers are incentivized to maximize time efficiency and every second counts. It's super painful.

We're now using other websites to buy from simply because their delivery takes approximately the same but goes to our door.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#92

Post by bart_spoon »

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…

You could be right, but you also could simply be suffering from result-oriented thinking. I'm more inclined to believe that Amazon dominates simply because it had a brilliant idea that it executed well at the right time. The reality is that Amazon solidified itself into a monopolistic position, and exploits that advantage in ways competitors can't compete with, first and foremost by selling products at a loss until competitors dry up. Everything about the culture, data driven decisions, management style, may have had little impact at all and is simply dressing up the boring reality.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#93

Post by MattGaiser »

Most non-Amazon businesses are mediocre.

Most grocery stores still don't have online ordering. Years, and years, and years, after Amazon entered the field, the other grocers have just decided to lie down and die.

Still waiting for Chapters (a bookstore in Canada) to start sending me reading good reading recommendations.

Still waiting on VISA to make generalized gift cards which are not miserable to use.

I'm trying to think of any industry Amazon took out when even tried to fight back. Most just whined their way into oblivion.

The problem with non-Amazon companies is that they don't do anything excellently.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#94

Post by SubiculumCode »

joefourier wrote: post #85
poxrud wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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)…

I often hear this repeated with Amazon, that it's pointless to try to compete with them because they can just undercut you on price, but I have seldom seen any evidence for it. AWS is one of the most expensive cloud/hosting services for compute, data, bandwidth, etc., the products sold on Amazon are almost always more expensive than buying them from alternate sites or directly from the source. The only cheap thing th…

I agree. Amazon store products used to be the cheapest available, but as they have become the "default" e-comerce site, I find their prices are frequently not the best. Pair that trend with the current uncertainty in product quality/authenticity at Amazon, I choose to buy directly from the brands website (i.e. buy a Jansport backpack from the Jansport website.). Funnily enough, I mainly use Amazon as a search to compare products.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#95

Post by three_seagrass »

tantalor wrote: post #41
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?

People trust the brands they grow up with. For example, Boomers trust Betty Crocker, Heinze, and AAA, which do not even show up for younger generations.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#96

Post by pydry »

joefourier wrote: post #85
poxrud wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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)…

I often hear this repeated with Amazon, that it's pointless to try to compete with them because they can just undercut you on price, but I have seldom seen any evidence for it. AWS is one of the most expensive cloud/hosting services for compute, data, bandwidth, etc., the products sold on Amazon are almost always more expensive than buying them from alternate sites or directly from the source. The only cheap thing th…

The story of diapers.com is probably as clear cut an example of predatory pricing as you could get:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...

The whole point of predatory pricing is that you jack the price up if you don't currently face any competition and use the threat of plunging prices to scare off competitors, so of course they're going to be more expensive by default.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#97

Post by danShumway »

subhobroto wrote: post #43
CPLX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints.

Do you not believe the government exists? Regulatory agencies aren't mythic gods, they're law enforcing bodies constructed by the people we vote for in every single election. You don't have to pray to them, you can just write them letters or call them.

Life does work that way, and has always worked that way since the beginning of the US. We have always regulated the market, even from the very first day that this country was founded.

> People are voting with their wallets

Yeah. And they're also voting by actually voting in the real elections that phrase is based on.

It's normal and realistic for government to break up monopolies and force regulations that help the market overall, especially in cases where market forces overall can't be trusted to enforce the same outcomes. We do this all the time; see pollution, price fixing, privacy violation, false advertising, and so on.

Arguably, Amazon itself only exists because of broad Title 2 classifications on the early Internet. No online business can in good faith argue that market regulation is unrealistic or impossible or inherently immoral, when the entire Internet ecosystem is built on top of the exact kinds of market regulation they're protesting: a forced level playing field that was forced by the government even though no individual consumer would have turned down zero-rated, prioritized, or access bundles through their ISPs.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#98

Post by caogecym »

Google has been the starting shopping point for me, not Amazon. Probably because:

1. Easy to access - I just need to type the item I want in browser address bar 2. I feel Google is relatively quicker at returning result - couple hundred millisecond that I can feel 3. I usually do find what I need in Google result

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#99

Post by cthalupa »

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…

> you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality.

From an outsider, it doesn't appear to me that Google is data driven, or at least they haven't ingrained it in their culture universally.

I can't imagine data lead them to believe they needed the 4 or 5 messaging apps they had at one point with the mix of hangouts, allo, duo, etc.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#100

Post by three_seagrass »

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…

Warm and fuzzies go away pretty quickly when you get a counterfeit product.

Wal-Mart won the retail game because it won the price war, like you said, but it held the keys to the kingdom for so long because it also enforced a minimum quality standard with suppliers.

Ebay used to be inexpensive and widely used until it was overrun with counterfeits and scams. Amazon is on the same path with it's lax counterfeit enforcement with suppliers and fake reviews.

Post reply on HN