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Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

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Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#221

Post by Bartweiss »

mongol wrote: post #198
joezydeco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It also is not unheard of for Wal-Mart to demand to examine the private financial records of a supplier, and to insist that its margins are too high and must be cut." https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

Honest question. How do companies in the US go about assessing the solvency and financial status of suppliers. In Sweden annual reports are public records for all limited companies, not only public companuee. How would US company determine that a supplier is solvent and not at risk of bankruptcy, which would be a risk to build into supply chains etc?

A lot like this, as I understand it. Publicly traded companies have a fair bit of information generally available, but for a private supplier you might well demand some financials to establish enough confidence to pair with them.

What's distinctive here, I guess, is that Walmart has the weight to get that info and then start making demands instead of just deciding whether to trust the partner.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#222

Post by KirinDave »

fragmede wrote: post #195
bedhead wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of hyperbole is absolutely and demonstrably absurd. What a disgrace that this is the top comment.

Simon Head wrote "Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers" back in 2014, and if anything, it's gotten worse since then. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_... It's not limited to warehouse workers, either. In 2015 Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York times published an expose of the hard-charging environment at Amazon, wit…

I'm glad someone else brought this up. I've been on mobile and walking from site to site all morning and haven't had a chance.

Thank you.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#223

Post by retailtech »

jameskegel wrote: post #132
retailtech wrote: post #102

I work in retailtech and this feeling is very common across retailers. Everyone feels like amazon is their biggest competitor and they don't want any of their money going (even indirectly) to amazon. Especially when the technology in question is supposed to help them compete better against amazon.

Is "retailtech" a real term now, or is that a typo?

What would it be a typo of?

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#224

Post by Kocrachon »

mschuster91 wrote: post #211
Kocrachon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies? Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle…

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be…

While it seems ideal, I don't like the idea of consumer goods being regulated outside of groceries and other necessities.

My Raptor romance novel should not be 'regulated'.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#225

Post by KirinDave »

mindcrime wrote: post #214
kristjansson wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Then what, in that world, do you call the artifice by which humans cooperate to sell other humans the the services the non-existent state isn't providing?

A company, or a business. Note that I did not say there wouldn't be business or companies... just not corporations because those are a specific legal entity that are created by the State.

You should be clearer on these definitions your using if you'd like to keep the description constructive. I certainly didn't recognize then context you were using.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#226

Post by maxxxxx »

oceanstone wrote: post #90
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #32

Interesting that Netflix (biggest competitor to Amazon Prime Video) still is on AWS. Not sure who is being savvy and who is being short sighted.

“The best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said. http://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing/...

I thought that the content is coming from AWS too. I think they could move away from AWS relatively easily if Amazon acted up.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#227

Post by LoSboccacc »

s73ver wrote: post #210
LoSboccacc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is a massive immoral monster this should be enough > devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either > It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger…

"Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either" You haven't proven that. And its entirely possible that it's not worse for the economy in general, but it's quite awful for segments of it. And given the current attitude toward the safety net in the US, once those jobs are gone, that's it for those people.

you haven't proven your point either, so it remains that the original claim was unsubstantiated, which is what I was trying to asses here

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#228

Post by LoSboccacc »

KirinDave wrote: post #206
LoSboccacc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is a massive immoral monster this should be enough > devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either > It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger…

I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance. I think that's awful. You think you should have to fight and use substantial resources to have a say in how your life is lived. I do not share this belief. But it's worth pulling at one string of your argument. Work is effectively mandatory for US citizens. You cannot handle any health crisis, or even ea…

> I can see where your coming from. You essentially want to end a guaranteed participatory role in civil governance.

nope, but I see that's not stopping you to go ahead and make up things about me just to hijack a high post for your tirade about social security, to which I agree in principle, but furthers nothing the argument at hand

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#229

Post by s73ver »

ancap wrote: post #151
empath75 wrote: post #144

If libertarians don't realize that the system they're advocating for is essentially corporate feudalism, they're suckers. I'd rather have a powerful government accountable to voters than a powerful corporate oligarchy that is only accountable to shareholders.

Except you're imagining power in entirely the wrong place. It is the consumers who hold all the power within a free economy. Corporations only become large and profitable in a free economy when they meet the ever increasing demands of the consumers. To quote Ludwig von Mises: The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, deci…

That's a nice thought, but just about all of human history proves your entire thing wrong.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#230

Post by taeric »

mschuster91 wrote: post #211
Kocrachon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? Back when Barnes and Noble was the big book store, same thing, they pressured better prices. What do you do, split up the book store into two companies, who still control the same market share and will both still put pressure on the book companies? Last I read, Amazon mainly fights for cheaper kindle…

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be…

I'm highly skeptical of the claim that printing and distribution costs are not that high. I get that they are not a high part of most publishers margins, but isn't that mainly because they have already invested in the infrastructure necessary to do these things. I would guess at a long timeline for deprecation write offs. This does not make them cheap, by any measure. (Indeed, just try printing a few thousand copies of a book personally, and see how small of a part of your margins this would be.)

Same is similarly true for ebook distribution. It isn't like the infrastructure to do that at scale is free, either. Both in technical of copying the bits around, and in the physical of authors/editors/etc.

However, I fail to see any way in which the advantages do not weigh in on the ebook side heavily.

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