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The Anti-Amazon Alliance

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Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#171

Post by c3534l »

Loughla wrote: post #164
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…

>That is a strategy only available to... monopolies. Wait. And this is 100% not meant to be snide, it's a real question. Isn't that the actual strategy for tech startups? Work with investor capital long enough to get established and own the market by selling at negative margins, then increase the price once you own the market?

It's not a new concept, either. It was something I learned about in introductory business courses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#172

Post by ornornor »

tracer4201 wrote: post #69
dllthomas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

So, no?

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#173

Post by DelightOne »

tootie wrote: post #109
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…

My last retail employer had multiple billions in revenue and had a really nice niche where they could apply a negative margin service to sell more goods. And a lot of their product catalog is far enough from Amazon's wheelhouse that they had room to operate. That being said, their ecommerce org was still a complete mess. They were spending a ton of money operating a homemade ecommerce platform based on 2007 technolog…

> Teams were all aligned horizontally.

What does this mean?

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#175

Post by lotsofpulp »

bsanr2 wrote: post #84
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…

I think the idea that Jobs had "great taste" is a myth. What he was good at was implementing an all-encompassing product strategy that established Apple products as status symbols. I don't think it's an accident that Apple "arrived" in the late 90s. Why? Because that's when their experience with education enterprise could be combined with the broad marketing lessons to be learned from products like Air Jordans. Apple…

>Every generation of Apple product has a competitor that's more elegant, better-performing, more durable and reliable, better integrated within its own ecosystem, etc.

Just the fact that Apple actually provides software updates for devices for years longer than their competitors seems to disprove at least part of this statement. Their investment in retail stores and customer service is laudable, but to say the iPad has any competition in any of the metrics mentioned above is not true.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#176

Post by AlexandrB »

ozkan wrote: post #114

Most companies are not customer obsessed , that's why they fail. Let me give you an example; I've bought a sofa set from Coleman, and supposedly I needed to measure the door, if the sofa can fix or not. Because of the shape of the hallway and entrance, the sleeper did not fix from door. And carrier guys did not want to push further. Luckily, my patio's door was large enough to fit. I've called Coleman and explained t…

Amazon lost me as a customer completely. They're not at all customer focused. Their shipping care/quality is horrendous (stuff is damaged all the time). Any non-trivial issues (anything that can't be resolved by refunding money, re-sending the item) have no path to resolution. Amazon.com itself is like a flea market: tons of untrustworthy/counterfeit merchandise, fake reviews everywhere.

Apple is customer obsessed. Amazon is efficiency obsessed.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#177

Post by scarface74 »

pc86 wrote: post #146
scarface74 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video encoding is definitely more expensive with AWS if you know how to do it yourself and you spend the money up front on hardware.

Name one thing on the cloud that isn't more expensive compared to owning the hardware and having the expertise to do it yourself?

It depends on both what you are optimizing for. People cost money. If you can trade enough of your time by having a cloud provider do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” to focus on your core competency, then it makes sense to use a provider.

For instance it didn’t make sense for DropBox to stay on Amazon but it did make sense for Netflix.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#178

Post by jimmaswell »

astrea wrote: post #121
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #59

People in tech vastly overestimate the amount of people who dislike Amazon. Your Average Joe could not be happier with Amazon and does not give a second thought to their business practices or worker treatment.

Breaking news: people are generally selfish.

You're assuming most people can afford to martyr themselves to pay extra on every purchase out of a moral stance.

Even if someone can afford that, I think it's been demonstrated futile to try to affect market behavior on the basis of employee treatment that's so normalized to everyone. Boycotts have worked on other specific issues on certain brands but it seems like people just don't care enough about Amazon's worker treatment or Nestle's horrible activities in Africa. So if those are never going to change without legislation then I can't really hold it against anyone for not paying out the nose to avoid Wal Mart and Amazon.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#179

Post by Aunche »

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…

Did Jobs really micromanage? From what I understand he just set high expectations and a lot of attention to detail.
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