441–450 of 628 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this would probably work , it seems insane to me that this would be the only thing to protect his listing from a completely different category of product being merged with another.
You're not wrong. Because Amazon's system is insane unless you realize it's designed only for the benefit of the corporation, not for any kind of fairness or quality.
What is the purpose of a Klein bottle for those of us not in the know? Can you store food in it or is it just the geometrical shape that fascinates children?
Is there any economics term for being "too big to care"? This seems to be a case of that, and it seems to be quite widespread at Amazon in particular. Just look at the mess that is the AWS console UI as another example. With all those billions and billions, you'd think that they could remedy a lot of this stuff. But alas, why bother when you are in such a dominant market position? Of course I could think of a lot of…
This uncaring attitude is directly a result of lack of competition. Amazon won. (Sure, there are some other big names in the game, but the online retail market is in a pathological state. As in case of other "natural monopolies" the network effect is very large, thus barriers to entry is absurdly high, hence no real competition. The incumbents are optimizing and diversifying, participating in meta-games - eg. lobbyin…
https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-dominates-us-ecomme...
To Amazon's credit, they did move fast and bet big on online retail first. But since it is a low barrier to entry business, there is next to profit to be had in it, so they really do not have an incentive to keep pouring into it. Why bother playing for 2% profit margins versus Walmart and Target and Home Depot and Costco when you can earn 15%+ as a platform.
If people stop using you, then oh well, switch to web services or media which have double digit profit margins, but it is not really a big loss. So I would say the uncaring attitude is due to lack of profits margins, compared to their alternative.
Guess I'd better say a few things. First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening! I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing. Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles…
My reciprocal appreciation to Fury, Atlanta/n, and Meester (and my many other friends on Hacker News). I deeply appreciate the kindness and support of the hacker community - sends me back thirty five years to when I was fooling with a Unix workstation and stumbled on a small accounting error. Back then, I was surprised by the outpouring of help, suggestions, and collaboration from other computer folk. At this moment,…
Do you still use the RC mini forklift for storage? I've always thought that seemed like a lot of fun.
"foreign" is provincial and kinda racist. "foreign to who"?
Is a seller in China foreign to a Chinese person?
Is a seller in Nigeria "foreign" to a Nigerian?
Is a seller in the UK "foreign" to a British person?
Will this make headlines in the broadsheets, The Washington Post in particular?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Cliff, I'm an independent amazon consultant. Your Amazon problems would be solved with a regular USPTO trademark. They don't recognize common-law trademarks because they are heavily arguable in litigation. USPTO is a database of trademarks already scrutinized by trademark attorneys and government. It's not perfect, but it is a collection that Amazon recognizes. You can do this for $2000-ish and never think about i…
It's a shame that a small-time reseller like Cliff has to go to the trouble and expense to register a trademark to protect his listing (which I doubt Cliff will bother with). Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming ever…
Amazon is unfortunately a very convenient plague on our beautiful ppanet, and Bezos seems like a borderline (if not outright) psychopath. it's late and i need to sleep, but just search the internet for "Jeff Bezos is a scumbag" and you'll see that people don't "just" hate him because he's filthy rich (nothing wrong with being filthy rich, lots of great people are!). https://trofire.com/2019/01/28/scumbag-jeff-bezos-t…
"Please don't fulminate."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Regardless of how you feel about $Bigco, plagues on planets, psychopaths, and similar rhetoric makes for bad HN threads, and we're trying to avoid those here. Thoughtful critique is welcome of course.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685624.
Amazon is unfortunately a very convenient plague on our beautiful ppanet, and Bezos seems like a borderline (if not outright) psychopath. it's late and i need to sleep, but just search the internet for "Jeff Bezos is a scumbag" and you'll see that people don't "just" hate him because he's filthy rich (nothing wrong with being filthy rich, lots of great people are!). https://trofire.com/2019/01/28/scumbag-jeff-bezos-t…
The problem is even once reliable sites like newegg.com are now playing these games. If I wanted the Ebay/alibaba experience I can get that! Why large retailer sites dilute their brand and frustrate customers in the fruitless chase of "being like Amazon" in catering to 3rd party sellers amazes and annoys me.
At least most other sites let you weed out the 3rd party sellers fairly easily. What's really annoying is with Amazon, even if you are buying from "Amazon" it could be ultimately supplied to Amazon by some hackney 3rd party and not a trusted wholesaler or the original manufacturer. And as Cliff Stoll found out, Amazon doesn't care either.
Talk about coasting on your reputation. It will be interesting to see how much trust they have to piss away before it affects them enough for them to finally pay attention to stuff like this :/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a shame that a small-time reseller like Cliff has to go to the trouble and expense to register a trademark to protect his listing (which I doubt Cliff will bother with). Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming ever…
Making the step from a hobby to a business means having to make the necessary investments, some of which may be costly and a pain in the ass, to protect one's intellectual property.