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Amazon Home Services

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Re: Amazon Home Services

#41

Post by moe »

stingraycharles wrote: post #9
dkyc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to see this framed so negative. What they do is essentially being the lean huge startup . They launch a product, gather initial feedback, and if it turns out promising (like AWS) they double-down. If it doesn't work, they kill it. I think it's actually nice to see such a rapid-iteration product development done by a company with that many resources and talent.

The problem is that they are using the Amazon brand to position it. This helps in gaining initial traction, but in the end damages the brand in two ways: - people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?) - when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts. There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (…

people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?)

In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general.

Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#42

Post by beaner »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #39

The is certainly space for a "Uber/Airbnb for home services", but I am not sure Amazon will be it. What startups are in this space, and do they have any traction?

Task Rabbit is pretty good and well known, and now there's Magic which sits on top of it. There's a lot more but they're smaller.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#45

Post by adventured »

Given the price that Angie's List is trading at - $370m market cap on $315m in sales - I'm surprised someone like Amazon doesn't just acquire them to jump start a business like this.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#46

Post by [deleted] »

serge2k wrote: post #33
MCRed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people…

> He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Home Services

#48

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

> Even AWS was a fake product-- they claimed it was "the infrastructure that ran Amazon.com", which was a straight up lie. (I worked for the company at the time.) All they had was S3. This product stuck to the wall and grew and became a real product over time, and so they backfilled.

Citation for this lie please. Because parts of your statement here do not really make sense. For instance that S3 was at one point they only service they had.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#49

Post by practicalpants »

minusSeven wrote: post #25
MCRed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that is DOA. It will never work because it will never be economical, nor safe. If you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize it's a joke-- like an April Fools joke.

do you mean to say drone's are more expensive than people ?

Their drones could easily be $30k+ a pop, and if they crash, need maintenance, irretrievably fly out of range, or simply become targets of angry people wanting to break them... all problems frequently encountered with high grade hobbyist drones.... then their value vs. an employee is questionable.

Crucially we're not even talking about R&D efforts, insurance, regulatory clearing costs, and probably the biggest cost, legal mishaps - and I mean very serious lawsuits - even toy-like DJI Phantom drones can fall/ crash and kill people.

I could see drone delivery to rural areas... but urban areas I don't think it's feasible at all, at least not for a long while.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#50

Post by imaginenore »

minusSeven wrote: post #25
MCRed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that is DOA. It will never work because it will never be economical, nor safe. If you think about it for a few minutes, you'll realize it's a joke-- like an April Fools joke.

do you mean to say drone's are more expensive than people ?

Calculate how many drones you need to deliver just one truck worth of parcels. Keep in mind you need drones capable of flying across the city carrying heavy stuff. Even if you limit them to only light and small packages, there's still a range problem.
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