41–50 of 136 posts
This drives me mad. I have no idea why Amazon even bothers with the retail side. It barely pays for itself, they are already the biggest player by a mile, and there is no horizon in which economies of scale start paying off (the uptick of demand from Covid probably lost them money!) The only thing that makes sense to me is some political long play. The Amazon retail operation employs a lot more people in a lot more p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes this even more bonkers to me is this is from something most non-tech people haven’t even heard of.
I wonder what the equivalent is for tech people. What is an enormous industry-specific business we have never heard of?
Here is a list I found from a quick search, try to guess which country the biggest producers is based in or how many of top 5 you expect to have heard of before opening the link.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the equivalent is for tech people. What is an enormous industry-specific business we have never heard of?
The steel production and raw materials industry is a whole different world. I am not knowledgable in the area at all but a recent linkedin post by a friend was listing the biggest steel producers by country, I did not recognise any names except Tata from India and Thyssenkrupp from Germany. Here is a list I found from a quick search, try to guess which country the biggest producers is based in or how many of top 5 yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the equivalent is for tech people. What is an enormous industry-specific business we have never heard of?
The steel production and raw materials industry is a whole different world. I am not knowledgable in the area at all but a recent linkedin post by a friend was listing the biggest steel producers by country, I did not recognise any names except Tata from India and Thyssenkrupp from Germany. Here is a list I found from a quick search, try to guess which country the biggest producers is based in or how many of top 5 yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It barely pays for itself Because they're constantly reinvesting for even bigger economies of scale. All investors are well aware that Amazon can start turning on major retail profits at any time it chooses. But the more it grows first, the more entrenched it is, the fewer competitors remain, and the even larger those future profits will be. Seeing as AMZN's stock price has increased roughly 25% since COVID started…
"Constantly reinvesting for even bigger economies of scale." This may have made sense 5 years ago, but this doesn't make sense when their margins have only gotten lower and their number one expense is employees, which is a marginal cost. They are well into the "diseconomies of scale" territory. And there are more competitors now then when they started! > You don't seem to actually understand Amazon's business model a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The steel production and raw materials industry is a whole different world. I am not knowledgable in the area at all but a recent linkedin post by a friend was listing the biggest steel producers by country, I did not recognise any names except Tata from India and Thyssenkrupp from Germany. Here is a list I found from a quick search, try to guess which country the biggest producers is based in or how many of top 5 yo…
I didn't even know Thyssenkrupp did things other than elevators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp
This just keeps getting more interesting.
This drives me mad. I have no idea why Amazon even bothers with the retail side. It barely pays for itself, they are already the biggest player by a mile, and there is no horizon in which economies of scale start paying off (the uptick of demand from Covid probably lost them money!) The only thing that makes sense to me is some political long play. The Amazon retail operation employs a lot more people in a lot more p…
> It barely pays for itself Because they're constantly reinvesting for even bigger economies of scale. All investors are well aware that Amazon can start turning on major retail profits at any time it chooses. But the more it grows first, the more entrenched it is, the fewer competitors remain, and the even larger those future profits will be. Seeing as AMZN's stock price has increased roughly 25% since COVID started…
Of course, the longer the time horizon investors are considering, the greater the risk of someone disrupting Amazon's profits in that time frame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After working for a company that spends millions of VC money on AWS per year I can also say that infinite cloud scaling is a myth. We had all kinds of downtimes due to AWS over the years.
> We had all kinds of downtimes due to AWS over the years. No, you just had downtime, full stop. Failures are inevitable, regardless of whose datacenter you're using. Failure-tolerant architecture design minimizes (or eliminates, if you're lucky) the downtime caused by failures. I'm not saying that's easy or necessarily appropriate depending on the stage of your company, but foisting responsibility onto AWS is missin…
This drives me mad. I have no idea why Amazon even bothers with the retail side. It barely pays for itself, they are already the biggest player by a mile, and there is no horizon in which economies of scale start paying off (the uptick of demand from Covid probably lost them money!) The only thing that makes sense to me is some political long play. The Amazon retail operation employs a lot more people in a lot more p…
> It barely pays for itself Because they're constantly reinvesting for even bigger economies of scale. All investors are well aware that Amazon can start turning on major retail profits at any time it chooses. But the more it grows first, the more entrenched it is, the fewer competitors remain, and the even larger those future profits will be. Seeing as AMZN's stock price has increased roughly 25% since COVID started…
To GP's point though, there is only so much market capacity for Amazon's growth so there will be a point that investors think that Amazon would best be using it's cash somewhere else, including dividends. It happened to Apple and it can happen to Amazon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the equivalent is for tech people. What is an enormous industry-specific business we have never heard of?
The steel production and raw materials industry is a whole different world. I am not knowledgable in the area at all but a recent linkedin post by a friend was listing the biggest steel producers by country, I did not recognise any names except Tata from India and Thyssenkrupp from Germany. Here is a list I found from a quick search, try to guess which country the biggest producers is based in or how many of top 5 yo…