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Amazon Beats Microsoft In 'The Battle of Seattle' (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned $5 billion in one afternoon when the company's stock price jumped 9.6%. Amazon reported an actual profit of $513 million (nearly double the amount expected), and next year Amazon's sales are projected by analysts to be 63% higher than Microsoft's, which USA Today calls "a good illustration of how growth in the sector has moved from hardware, software and chip companies to Internet firms selling goods or advertising online... [W]hile Bill Gates helped put Seattle area on the map as a U.S. tech hub, Bezos now runs the largest tech company in the State of Washington, by far, in terms of sales."
Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool.
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world. But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.
Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool.
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world. But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.
I myself signed up for Prime this year. I buy enough stuff to warrant the fee, plus there is some video and music I like. I expect them to double down on the content creation and look forward to an old media vs. web media content war...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
American enterprise at its finest.
Taxes? We're too big to pay taxes!
Watch Mycroft. It has the potential to outdo Echo, and quite handily, too.
Looks a little dumb with the face and all, but it's OS, so you can hack (fix) that quite easily.
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
There's a simple reason: you can keep two cars in a nearby state for less than the cost of one in Seattle. The law says you must keep your car mostly in the home state in order to qualify for residency, so drive it for five months a year in Seattle then take it home and bring the other one back.Either way you come out ahead. It's good business, and as always, business is ahead of government.
Ridiculous fluff article. Wal-mart's revenue is more than twice that of Apple's, but no one would claim that Wal-mart is beating Apple.
Microsoft's profit in one quarter is greater than the sum of all profits ever achieved by Amazon through their entire existence. To claim that Amazon has somehow "won" some battle is ridiculous when you're talking about revenue, not profits. They have to do something about their profit margins if they're going to turn revenue into profit...
Sorry, maybe there's profit from selling goods online. Advertising won't be profitable. It's a bubble that's not sustainable. Regulation and ad blocking will kill that industry, especially as people tire of intrusive ads and drive-by malware. I found it interesting that YouTube is playing unskippable 30 second ads simultaneously popping up a message encouraging people to sign up for YouTube Red. No, I won't sign up for that, but it's a sign that advertising is failing and Google is getting desperate.
I clicked it and it led to the picture of the goatse.cx guy. Don't click it!
Ride a rocket
Too late on the "Echo on a non-Amazon device": Amazon Echo DIY with a Raspberry Pi
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
your best employees, of course you're going to be at a disadvantage. I've lived in Seattle since 1986, and it always amazes me that my friends that are the best developers are always the ones that Microsoft gets rid of. Instead of moving the best people to new projects, they just get rid of entire teams when their wishy-washy management changes priorities. A friend that worked for them since 1988(IIRC) when they bought Sybase and rebranded it as SQL server, was recently laid-off. They discontinued the feature he was working on. Also, three of my old apartmentmates were let go last year after each spending over a decade on the Windows build team. Microsoft is attempting to move the build to China, and of course, is having problems. When you constantly git rid of your most experienced people, of course you're going to have problems.
Starbucks on the other hand beat both their profits combined with billions in profit last year. I certainly helps that many people are addicted to caffeine.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Because their US divisions are making a loss year after year, and have no [taxable] income at all
There are plenty of companies with higher revenues than Microsoft (eg most oil companies, Wal*Mart, etc.). That doesn't mean higher profits though. Amazon sells so much stuff, it was inevitable their revenues would increase. But their profit margins are pretty small.
Really bad journalism or just someone that doesn't understand financials? MS profit per quarter is orders of magnitude higher than amazons.
sorry my mistake, misread their share price. Regardless you cannot compare shareprices, only morons that don't understand stocks make such idiotic statements. a share in Amazon buys a much larger chunk of the company than a share in MS. To do a comparison you would need to compare about 16 MS shares to 1 Amzn share to be able to attempt to compare share price.
It's actually almost insane that we still give shares a nominal value, precisely because it is utterly meaningless. The question for an investor is not what the share value is, it's what the actual value is. When I decide to buy stock, I pick a dollar value to buy. When I decide to sell, I look at dollar value I can sell for. The share price is irrelevant 99.9% of the time.
Amazon is the last in a long line of middlemen that make up a supply chain. Anyone who is silly enough to measure companies by revenue is naturally going to have a bias that makes them think that retailers are "bigger" than manufacturing and engineering companies. What matters isn't the revenue that passes through a company, but the profit that they get to keep.
I'm not trying to put down Amazon - they're a very successful company and probably one day they'll be bigger than Microsoft. But not today.
Considering those assholes at Amazon signed me up for a Prime account without my knowledge, tried to bill me for it, and I had to scream at customer service until they removed it with the thread I would never be eligible for prime again.
I trust Amazon about as much as I trust Google. 0%
The summary is also misleading in saying that "Amazon CEO made ...". He was paid $80,000 for being CEO.
Separately, he was also the principal investor in the company at its founding, the owner of company. The OWNERS/investors made made money (on paper) when the stock went up. That has nothing to do with whether he's the CEO, or even works there.
To make that more clear, I founded a company about 20 years ago. About four years ago, I got burned out on being CEO, so I quit working for that company and got another job. I don't get paid by that company since I don't work there. However, I still OWN the company, all of the stock, so profits end up with me. My gains as the sole investor have nothing to do with whether I work there, which I don't. Bezos is similar- he's done well on his investment in Amazon. Coincidentally, he also happens to work there, but that's separate.
Amazon isn't a tech company. It's a general store.
Amazon is selling dollar bills for 95 cents. Big deal. Anybody can do that. It's quite frankly, moronic, to compare them to Microsoft.
I don't respond to AC's.
We should probably look at the total cost of the vehicle, including purchasing and insurance.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Amazon, Inc. is the new Sears & Roebuck Co.
Some decades from now we'll see them closing up too. It will probably happen shortly after Jeff Bezos retires.
These companies seem to run on the drive and personality of their founding CEO. We're already seeing Microsoft crumble away after the exit of Bill Gates, arguable he checked out mentally long before he officially left. Apple may follow a similar trend downward without Steve Jobs.
I predict that Bezos may only want to run the Amazon machinery for another 5-10 years before he moves on to other interests, especially now that the machine is running so well and many of the growth challenges have already been conquered.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you buy shit from them YOU ARE the problem.
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