A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly. In any functional society this beast would have long since been broken up before becoming dominant in multiple industries. At this point, they're pretty much emblematic of the rot at the core of western society.
What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#22This read was mildly interesting, but I'm left thinking that the study of any sprawling monopoly will come up with similar mildly interesting and irrelevant rationalizations of success. Once you get as as big as Amazon was in the early 2010s, provided your culture doesn't melt down (by itself no small feat), you are well positioned to expand and flatten adjacent parts of the economy. So the question is whether you re…
> you are well positioned to expand and flatten adjacent parts of the economy Yet others with Amazon’s scale have tried and failed at this sort of horizontal integration.
I think it’s just cherry picking. Amazon has failed in plenty of businesses they’ve tried to enter. Tablets, phones, app stores, their streaming boxes aren’t exactly market dominant.
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#23The pattern is quite simple. Build infrastructure to serve internal operations at a scale no rational external buyer would justify. Optimize it to a level that drives marginal cost below the buyer’s internal alternative. When the surplus capacity is too large to write off, open the API and sell it. Forgot the last part: when you have eliminated all the competition and have all your customers locked in with no other o…
Isn't that already illegal in many countries (dumping)? The issue is that AWS is embedded in many governments and there is no appetite to do anything about it. If a country started proceedings against AWS they'd risk their country infrastructure going down, so it is a no go. I wonder why this has not been considered as national security risk and frankly negligence.
Dumping is selling at a loss. The quote clearly describes selling for a profit.
Aws marginal cost is below the internal production price of the buyer
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#24The pattern is quite simple. Build infrastructure to serve internal operations at a scale no rational external buyer would justify. Optimize it to a level that drives marginal cost below the buyer’s internal alternative. When the surplus capacity is too large to write off, open the API and sell it. Forgot the last part: when you have eliminated all the competition and have all your customers locked in with no other o…
break. up. Amazon. break up Apple, Meta, MSFT, etc... while we're at it. Or, keep it simpler - if a company passes a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, they must forgo lobbying and "government relations". if you're worth a trillion dollars or more, you don't need the government to hold your hand.
A trillion? Why wouldn’t we set the bar at $0 - companies are not people, and allowing them to influence politics, at any size, corrupts democracy
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This gets the story of AWS wrong How?
It's not completely wrong, but overly simplistic: > In 2006, Amazon launched what is now AWS, exposing the internal compute, storage, and database services its retail group had built. The internal pitch was identical to Marketplace seven years earlier. These were not internal services, and it wasn't exactly the retail group that built them (Chris and Ben were dedicated to EC2 and the team ran remote from Seattle). No…
I'd call that completely wrong. It's become something of an urban legend but the reality is that AWS was net new. It was not share Amazon infrastructure with the world
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#26 Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store!
More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" business, it's logistics business, and it's internet business all under one roof. The P&G discussion here highlights how insane it is that this isn't being investigated and prosecuted.
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#27A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly. In any functional society this beast would have long since been broken up before becoming dominant in multiple industries. At this point, they're pretty much emblematic of the rot at the core of western society.
>A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly
No it's not, the definition of a monopoly is a seller without any competitors. Stop spreading lies. Amazon has plenty of competitors for what it sells, but it has a large market share because its products and services are generally cheapest.
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#28What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house. I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent b…
It's really unfortunate. I used to order from Amazon a lot when they mostly handed off to USPS.
I can get Amazon logistics to deliver where I live, but it's pretty unreliable. Usually delayed, or it doesn't arrive until 8pm and given how Amazon treats their drivers, I hate being part of that problem no one should have to be out making home deliveries that late.
I'd much prefer if they just kept using USPS. Public service and reliable, and usually here by noon.
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#29It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large tech companies simply don't have.
Re: What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” tells us about what Amazon is
#30A gargantuan "everything company" like Amazon is the very definition of a monopoly. In any functional society this beast would have long since been broken up before becoming dominant in multiple industries. At this point, they're pretty much emblematic of the rot at the core of western society.
The word you're thinking of is "Conglomerate"