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The Anti-Amazon Alliance

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Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#261

Post by WaltPurvis »

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 only cheap thing that Amazon offers is fast shipping for low-cost products, e.g. buying a $3 cable and getting it shipped for free the next day (assuming you have Prime). But for anything above $50-$100, Amazon is almost always the more expensive option.

Where electronics are concerned, for years I would go to Best Buy to look at merchandise first-hand, then go home and buy it from Amazon, because Amazon was almost always significantly cheaper (especially before they started collecting sales tax).

Now it's the opposite.

I use Amazon to find products, read reviews, etc., and then I go to Best Buy's website to order it. It's almost always the same price or lower at Best Buy, and since I happen to have a Best Buy store only five minutes from my house, I can order it and pick it up in under an hour.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#262

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #213
poxrud wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prices for AWS products only tell a small part of the story. The real costs are in outgoing bandwidth. Take the encoding example above, you might pay a competitive price for the compute time required to encode, but you'll be paying some of the highest bandwidth fees in the industry if you were to stream out your encoded video to multiple viewers.

You'd use a CDN.

[deleted]

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#263

Post by jmastrangelo »

breischl wrote: post #65
Infinitesimus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems to me that when it comes to growing and scaling their successful products, Google is data-driven. However when bringing new products to market Google basically has been driven by what leadership thinks is interesting/important, instead of analyzing what the market wants.

Sometimes they hit a big opportunity like Gmail and it grows like crazy, but a lot of the time there's actually no market for their product, or the technology is nowhere near ready to work at scale. This leads to a lot of canceled projects.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#264

Post by nxc18 »

adadahdjej wrote: post #229
nxc18 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I wonder what major global event could have caused that in the last two months.

The issue isn’t that things are delayed, the issue is they are saying an item isn’t going to get here until May when they know full well that it’s been put on a truck and will arrive today.

They are advertising their shipping speed as being worse than it is, causing people to think competitors are faster, when, typically, Amazon is still superior.

Edit: needlessly inflammatory language

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#265

Post by qvrjuec »

noizejoy wrote: post #227
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.

Less than 40% of Average Joes apparently [0] [0] https://morningconsult.com/most-trusted-brands/

Either you missed the point of that survey or you're deliberately misrepresenting its results. Did you miss the sentence that said 'This ranking is determined by share of "a lot" responses.'? Amazon is the 2nd most trusted brand, according to that survey.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#266

Post by anon73044 »

chrischen wrote: post #197
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…

1. The problem for me is that for any given product category, I don’t know who the online retailers are . For electronics there is microcenter.com, frys.com, tigerdirect.com, circuitcity.com, and many many more. 2. I think this is something that is burned into people’s heads but not actually true. Most retailers do offer pretty fast shipping. Even with prime you’re paying for fast shipping (in the membership fee).

Tigerdirect has a pitiful selection as far as PC building goes, and usually their prices are not even remotely competitive. I'm not even sure how they're still in business.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#267

Post by pas »

Loughla wrote: post #252
thr0w__4w4y wrote: post #225

Way way back, when Amazon got bigger than just books, my motivation for using them was a) very good selection (in one order, I can order bagel chips, wiper blades and a router?) and b) price. Implicit in this was authenticity and good customer service -- for me, if the product isn't the real thing, or the company is a nightmare to deal with, it's a non-starter. Well now here we are. Fake reviews, counterfeit products…

>their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense I would argue that it's even worse. At least, IME, the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something. With Amazon, neither mean a damned thing anymore. It's just a crap shoot, unless you know exactly what you're already looking for. Amazon used to be nice, because you could actually do product research. The worst thing, again in my opinion,…

> unless you know exactly what you're already looking for.

I know what I'm looking for, but most of the products are impossible to evaluate, because there is just not enough info/data. Low res bad stock photos, terse description, no full technical specs, etc.

And many Amazon sellers don't sell anywhere else, they don't even have a real website, so ... good luck deciding based on that.

And since Amazon become so big, they set the bar for quality. So now the same shit is everywhere. (Plus there's the high-end overpriced but also not perfect segment too.)

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#268

Post by ardy42 »

d1zzy wrote: post #185
ardy42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thei…

> 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. You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation…

> You do realize that all the problems you listed exist because of regulation or can also be solved with regulation? Maybe instead of regulating how Comcast does business we should regulate things so it's easy to have many ISPs.

I was mainly just responding to the weird idea that "anyone" who doesn't like Comcast should start their own ISP.

More competition would be great, but I think it'd only occur within some kind of regulatory framework that explicitly encourages it, which I think is along the lines you're thinkging. ISPs are basically natural monopolies that require significant amounts of expensive physical plant to operate. The unregulated free market handles such situations poorly, so some kind of regulation is a necessity even if it's not the current regulatory regime.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#269

Post by duxup »

thr0w__4w4y wrote: post #225

Way way back, when Amazon got bigger than just books, my motivation for using them was a) very good selection (in one order, I can order bagel chips, wiper blades and a router?) and b) price. Implicit in this was authenticity and good customer service -- for me, if the product isn't the real thing, or the company is a nightmare to deal with, it's a non-starter. Well now here we are. Fake reviews, counterfeit products…

For me Amazon was a way to find a selection of HIGHER quality products than I could at local stores that maybe had 1 item that was ok quality and 2 low quality products.

Now when I go to Amazon they push the lowest cost thing even if by a $1 (like Wallmart). These weird "Amazon's Choice" options are increasingly lower quality cheap stuff. And Amazon day feels like a garage sale where I think they're pushing out their back stock of rock bottom quality garbage ... more than usual. And that's not to mention fakes and etc.

At this point I'm shopping around the internet way more than I used to when I was all about Amazon first.

Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance

#270

Post by caseysoftware »

Loughla wrote: post #252
thr0w__4w4y wrote: post #225

Way way back, when Amazon got bigger than just books, my motivation for using them was a) very good selection (in one order, I can order bagel chips, wiper blades and a router?) and b) price. Implicit in this was authenticity and good customer service -- for me, if the product isn't the real thing, or the company is a nightmare to deal with, it's a non-starter. Well now here we are. Fake reviews, counterfeit products…

>their website is almost nothing more than Ebay in some sense I would argue that it's even worse. At least, IME, the ratings at E-bay for both sellers and products mean something. With Amazon, neither mean a damned thing anymore. It's just a crap shoot, unless you know exactly what you're already looking for. Amazon used to be nice, because you could actually do product research. The worst thing, again in my opinion,…

When I know vaguely what a product should do, I use Amazon to find the specific brand, product, and models. Then I try to buy it directly from the manufacturer whenever possible.

What's the search engine equivalent of "showrooming"?

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