Good article. There are a few unknowns still. 1. Is Google really all in on product search? Their product search is pretty bad at the moment and it's a very challenging search space, esp when you work with tens of thousands of retailers. Going directly to retailer/niche-platform sites usually works better for me. For example, for music related I go to reverb.com, for outdoor to rei.com, etc. I then to Google and Amaz…
The Anti-Amazon Alliance
51–60 of 419 posts
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for. The fact that ours is for sale to the highest bidder is problematic, clearly, but the whole point of antitrust as a concept is you can't just start a competitor, because of the predatory anti-competitive actions of the monopolist.
> It's not the job of the average consumer to conduct antitrust enforcement. That's what governments are for. Ah the "government" playbook. Life does not work that way. If I want to affect change, I have to get the job done. The "government" is you and I. There's no group of people up in the sky listening to our complaints. How many of the people here complaining about Amazon being evil have even written a grievance…
Yeah, no. They're at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Blue & Orange line: https://www.justice.gov/atr/about-division
Problem is they've mostly decided not to do their job since about 1997 or so.
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#53I know Google's doing this for their own reasons, but I'll take the help. I've been an Amazon customer since 1997, but their recent anti-worker actions [1] were the straw [2] that broke the camel's back. I canceled my Prime account, and have decided to start my product search elsewhere. Google's product search has been long neglected, so it's great they're giving it some love. [1] E.g. from many: https://www.nbcnews.…
And I've tried google's shopping - blah. If that's your starting point we are going to be with amazon for a while.
Recently tried to avoid amazon - got some stuff from a name brand retailer. The return process required a 40 minute hold time, and because it was one order they only give one return label even though order came in two large boxes. So now it's around and around to try to figure out the second label. It's apparently an outsourced return provider (is that a thing) so the logic / communication related to the original sellers product is terrible.
The last time this happened they ended up giving a store credit for sale price, a refund and never sent the label! Ended up giving away a pretty expensive item ($150). I mean it's just a totally unintegrated system
Compared to amazon (walk into Kohl's / UPS store even unsealed / drop in a locker / give to mailroom to give to UPS guy, stack item on UPS box in garage etc etc) it's night and day different.
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might not want to hear it, but those that were fired recently were using their company email address to organize union discussions. You just can’t do that, no matter how justified one is to pursue unionizing.
Isn't that a protected workplace activity?
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#55As a consultant, I see companies struggling to compete with Amazon (or Amazon-like companies). Most companies struggle for a couple of reasons - They are ego driven, with legacy execs & others relentlessly protecting their status - whereas Amazon is relentlessly data-driven - They have poor incentive structures and are feature factories. They value velocity over outcomes. Amazon, by being more data driven, is focused…
I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of that as a monopoly strategy, and I'm also genuinely curious how you know those are "negative margin" services. To the first, the strategy seems more about vertical integration than monopoly per se. Plenty of businesses aim to make a profit overall, but either have an outright strategy of loss leaders or more commonly have individual services that are absolutely necessary to the rest of the business yet are not profitable in and of themselves. And if the opportunity comes to leverage some of those internal divisions to some degree it can be completely reasonable.
To the first, the console market would be an example of a competitive sector (at least since the mid-90s) where players have quite fairly run one part at an initial loss (hardware in the first few years) with the plan to make it up on add-ons. They can further average break-even or profit over the product lifespan, because the hardware functionality is fixed but will be vastly cheaper to manufacture in Year 7 vs Year 1.
To the second, it's not uncommon at all for a business to require a certain amount of internal hardware or services for operations that is sitting idle a fair amount of the time, generates no direct revenue, or both. This is part of the whole logic behind cloud computing, or the constant tension of critical IT being seen as a "cost center". There isn't much minimal size for that to be the case either, even a small company may easily have a share of underutilized kit. In those cases, the marginal cost can be extremely low, even near-zero. If it can be turned into any sort of useful service or value-add at all with low enough overhead then it's still of value.
So I'm concerned your formulation is overly reductive of any company to its parts. The vertical strategy has real advantages as well as disadvantages, gains that are quite genuinely win-wins which is why they work. For AWS for example, that's a core business for Amazon and also something they require for their own activities. How much of the capacity is sitting idle at any given time so they can be prepared for when actual high priority customers need to spin things up? They certainly require significant margin to respond to variations in demand. Video encoding seems like a great way to fill troughs and average things out, since it can easily be run low priority, and the marginal cost is going to just be the electricity running chips at full vs power saving. Compared to all the cost of having the datacenter and hardware and staff supporting it at all, even just sitting around doing nothing, that's probably a pretty low fraction. Is video coding actually costing Amazon money vs what value they gain, or is it simply an area where they quite genuinely can do it for less, putting otherwise idle necessary capacity to use? And what about Azure or GCP, or even someone just running dedicated encoding hardware? How does Amazon have a monopoly on compute? If they're merely able to do it cheaper thanks to scale, what exactly is the problem? If they raised prices above what competitors or someone could do themselves where is the lock-in for video encoding?
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't appear to be true: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em... > Also, restrictions on your efforts to communicate with co-workers cannot be discriminatory. For example, your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about the union during working time if it permits you to talk about other non-work-related matters during working time.
At that point the devil is in the details. I worked at a place where all emails had to be work related. That was in the Cable TV Industry. Which, in it's own way makes sense; that industry has a 'Owner'->'Prime Contractor'->'Subcontractor' tiered setup for work that has always had the unspoken purpose of preventing field workers and installers from unionizing. Wanted to send out an email about a fundraiser or special…
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your points, but I've also found another one that is far more common: They sell products at a loss to gain income in other places. For example, if you are a content producer you are competing with a company that sells "ad-free" video (Prime Video) attached to a low-cost service (Prime) so that they can sell more goods online. Amazon is killing content producers by running a negative margin content busine…
don't forget they are also cannibalizing sellers that use their own platform by launching cheaper competition - Amazon basics etc.
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I agree. A lot of large companies can invest deeply just to drive out their competition. WalMart famously did the same to drive out other businesses in the 90s and 00s. I think though we need to recognize that Amazon is succesful for a reason, and those reasons are why they are in a position to invent even deeper and more relentlessly...
I don’t think Amazon is inventing anything new in the space of driving out competition using a technique derived by gilded age industrial revolution
Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#59Re: The Anti-Amazon Alliance
#60>as John Gruber put it on Daring Fireball, “Amazon isn’t hurting for revenue (especially now), but they are hurting for trust.” This is empirically false. Amazon is the second most-trusted brand in America . https://morningconsult.com/most-trusted-brands/ It's wild how easily SV types will tweet things like "No one trusts Amazon!" when the reality outside the Bay Area is so radically and demonstrably opposite.
I would say that they are hurting for trust, right along with everyone else.