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Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

blog.samgerstenzang.com

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Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#71

Post by hef19898 »

chatman wrote: post #58
samg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read the post with a heavy dose of sarcasm mixed with admiration :) I'd very much like to see formidable challengers arise. And I actually wrote this post a week before Bezos bought the WaPo, although I think it only underscores the point.

Before you write anything again on Bozo or Amazon, please read http://stallman.org/amazon . If you have already read it, fine.

I just read through that link. What a nice list of naive points. Well, maybe I miss some context on the UK angle, i can make some comparisons with the german one.

The sweatshop warehouses, yeah. And you really think when you order a bokk by your local book store the people in the warehouse sending are treated any better? In this part of logistics, and I'm not at all proud of that, one of the easiest ways to cut costs (and everyone operating a warehouse will do that since logistics is regarded by most people as costs) is HR. The part of being ordered around by a computer, welcome to logistics in the 21st century. And that part is true for truck drivers, too. How are books delivered to your local book store again? If you think the boys and girls delivereing parcels for UPS and the like are treated any better, forget it. Most of them aren't even employed by these companies anymore, they are mere sub-contractors.

And at least were I live, the credit of killing local, independant book stores goes to big bookstore chains and not Amazon. Quite ironic that these chains are now trying to get a share of the eBook market using the same DRM techniques everybody is blaming Amazon for.

And this tax evading scheme. Hell I worked for big company that operated at the same site for more tha a decade before they payed ANY taxes there. The COO was quite sad they finally had to. Most european big corps are doing the very same thing with branches in, say, Delaware.

All that is not to say I consider all this to be good or even OK. It's just the way it is. Classical case of hate the game, not the player. But I don't think Benzos is troubled a lot by all this.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#72

Post by adventured »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
selectiveshift wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of what Amazon does, does not compete with technology companies. In the few places they do, they're not a juggernaut. Since when is AWS not a juggernaut...

They're definitely a leader in the space, but its not like it isn't a commodity. Great, you've got a durable object store and virtual machines. I'm not Netflix, I'm not Reddit. I don't need to scale to a bazillian users, and even if I did, its going to be with Akamai and the whole damn site mostly static (I'm looking at you, Healthcare.gov). So, yeah, AWS is awesome. But its not like others can't/aren't catching up.

You're talking about today.

Tomorrow AWS is a $10 billion sales business, with offerings that are 10 times more powerful at 1/3rd the cost that they are now. And that is what Bezos has his eye on.

You're not Reddit? The value proposition will continue to skyrocket for smaller entities too, and it will swamp most of the market. That is the Amazon model, and they're clearly going to stick to it. At scale (AWS is probably only 5% to 10% the scale it'll be in just five years), very few will stand a chance at keeping up.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#73

Post by adventured »

curiouslurker wrote: post #48

I will make the bold claim that within 10 years amazon will fall apart at the seams like a cheap suit in a storm. You cannot run a non profit forever no matter how large your market share is or how obsessed you are about customers. The culture (from what we can glean from the excerpts of the new book on Bezo's) is also toxic and is unlikely to produce an enduring successful company. Senior execs can't pass gas withou…

You don't seem to actually understand Amazon's business.

First of all, there isn't even a remote threat to their retail empire. Everybody else is a drastically distant joke. They're already the size of Target, and they're still growing rapidly. Nobody stands a chance at catching them. Walmart.com continues to just flail in the wind. That means they're going to end up with a monster position that can't be assaulted in the next decade. A simple extrapolation reveals that in a matter of seconds. Just toss a mere 5 years onto their growth and they'll do nothing but pad their crazy lead over the competition.

They paid off billions in debt post dotcom bubble. How do you suppose they dug themselves out of that hole without generating tons of cash?

Where'd they get the $11.3b in cash they ended fiscal '12 with? How'd they pay for all those warehouses?

Answer: they produce plenty of cash courtesy of a very healthy business model

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#74

Post by adventured »

jfoster wrote: post #52
frewsxcv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I haven't been reading much, but what else has Yahoo done recently besides bring in Mayer and do a website redesign?

They've done a lot of acquisitions. I think the biggest was Tumblr. Not much to show from the acquisitions yet, but based on the fact that there has been acquisitions, Googlers moving to Yahoo, etcetera, I think there's a pretty good chance they're working on some things that will eventually pay off.

Well right now that sounds a lot like the old Yahoo that blew massive amounts of shareholder value on terrible acquisitions that never panned out.

Tumblr will pay for itself? Not a chance they're going to earn a billion dollars off of that, much less turn a healthy profit. As such, at it seems like all Mayer is doing is burning value on a spend $3 get $1 back exchange. Works great in a stock market bubble of course.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#75

Post by jfoster »

adventured wrote: post #74
jfoster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've done a lot of acquisitions. I think the biggest was Tumblr. Not much to show from the acquisitions yet, but based on the fact that there has been acquisitions, Googlers moving to Yahoo, etcetera, I think there's a pretty good chance they're working on some things that will eventually pay off.

Well right now that sounds a lot like the old Yahoo that blew massive amounts of shareholder value on terrible acquisitions that never panned out. Tumblr will pay for itself? Not a chance they're going to earn a billion dollars off of that, much less turn a healthy profit. As such, at it seems like all Mayer is doing is burning value on a spend $3 get $1 back exchange. Works great in a stock market bubble of course.

You're right that Tumblr probably won't pay for itself as an individual unit, but perhaps the new Yahoo might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's not a sure thing, of course. We still need to see if they have a coherent direction. If they don't, then they probably can't be greater than the sum of their parts.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#76

Post by michaelwww »

tempestn wrote: post #66
michaelwww wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Sports commentary has been called (paraphrase) 'a business built on talking about the results of a weighted random number generator'. I expect that parent is using this comparison to express a judgement on the value of the article...

True story: I just woke up with a dream. In it, I was suggesting to political commentator William Kristol that Jeff Bezos was the new Steve Jobs who could fill the void left by Jobs passing. Never underestimate the power of the narrative ;-)

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#78

Post by hacknat »

hncommenter13 wrote: post #56
hacknat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are hardly a non-profit. He is maybe the most aggressive CEO in the US right now for putting money back into the company. Amazon's cash flow is insane, if they put the brakes on reinvestment right now, they would be making billions and billions per quarter.

1. I'm not so sure about that. According to the most recent financial statement[1], AMZN hasn't generated much in the way of net cash from operations over the past 12 months. Worse yet, they're spending an amount in excess of that on investments (some of which is really capitalized operating expense, like internal software development, that companies like MSFT expense directly). In fact, for the 12 months ended 6/30/…

Umm... What?

The 10-Q you just posted says AMZN pulled in $4 Billion in cash equivalents for the quarter which is almost double what they did the last equivalent quarter. It also says they have $8 billion in the last 6 month period whereas the year before they had $5 billion in the same 6 month period.

My point wasn't that they are making a profit, my point is that they are pumping enormous amounts of money into their own infrastructure. Looks at the capital investments section of the report.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#79

Post by toomuchtodo »

adventured wrote: post #72
toomuchtodo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're definitely a leader in the space, but its not like it isn't a commodity. Great, you've got a durable object store and virtual machines. I'm not Netflix, I'm not Reddit. I don't need to scale to a bazillian users, and even if I did, its going to be with Akamai and the whole damn site mostly static (I'm looking at you, Healthcare.gov). So, yeah, AWS is awesome. But its not like others can't/aren't catching up.

You're talking about today. Tomorrow AWS is a $10 billion sales business, with offerings that are 10 times more powerful at 1/3rd the cost that they are now. And that is what Bezos has his eye on. You're not Reddit? The value proposition will continue to skyrocket for smaller entities too, and it will swamp most of the market. That is the Amazon model, and they're clearly going to stick to it. At scale (AWS is probab…

No, the value proposition does not continue to skyrocket. If you are a well established digital property and know your load profile, AWS is prohibitively expensive "just in case" you may need to scale to thousands of virtual machines.

Re: Who’s afraid of Jeff Bezos?

#80

Post by saabster27 »

Let's not overlook Jack Ma of Alibaba. When it started Taobao in China to compete with eBay China, eBay had 85% of the online auction market in China. Within a few years, eBay was forced out of the China market completely. And if one looks at Taobao closely, its model is much friendlier to small businesses and that's the main driver of its success. I wouldn't be surprised if Taobao starts competing with eBay globally within the next few years. And then there is alibaba.com...
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