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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
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...
Too late on the "Echo on a non-Amazon device": Amazon Echo DIY with a Raspberry Pi
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
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
Actually the reality is quite the opposite: the worst employees get laid off and they try to keep the best with retention bonuses. They fact that you have "apartment mates" at your age is very telling.
Taxes? We're too big to pay taxes!
Washington State has no corporate income tax. Amazon pays all the federal income tax that they are legally required to pay, which hasn't been much, because they have not had much profit. If you don't like our tax system, then write to your congressperson, or vote for Bernie. Blaming Amazon is silly.
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.
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.
There's a BO tax here to discourage startups.
Couldn't they avoid that tax by using deodorant, or by showering more frequently?
I'm making $35k a year after nine years with a Microsoft vendor. It's hard to afford your own place while making that.
Jesus, $35k per year after nine years? Please say that is some kind of tier 1 customer service, or serving food or something.
The GP must live in the Midwest or something.
While the GP was being a jerk about it, he was certainly insunuating that the AC must be someone who still had trouble paying a few thousand for his dwelling after decades in the IT industry. It is probably accurate that someone with over 20 years experience who has trouble paying $3500 per month in rent does not have the expertise to identify the *best* developers at Microsoft.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It's a $3,500 a month two bedroom overlooking Elliott Bay, and I have my own bedroom. Plus, parking is $380 per month per space. Could you afford that by yourself?
$3500 per month is not that much for successful IT personnel. Paying 50% of take home on rent is not uncommon in city areas, which only comes to a salary of about $125k per year. Even in the Midwest that isn't very high for someone with about 10 years of experience. Certainly anyone skilled enough to identify the *best* Microsoft developers makes much more than that.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Irrelevant. Shares do not represent a percent of votes. The number of shares is itself arbitrary and changeable. For instance, it can do a stock split, or it can simply issue new shares and dilute the current ones.
The company can even render your vote irrelevant after the fact. There are laws against being egregious here, but in principle 51% of the company can vote to issue bonus shares to that same 51%. Usually in exchange for money (capital investment), although occasionally a part of an acquisition. Boom, now the 49% of the company at $1 per share ten years ago is 4% of the company at $1000 per share, and you only have 4% of the votes, meaning you lost 45% of the votes without even doing anything even though you voted against it. You still made a shitload of money though, so you can't complain too much.
The only meaning to quantity of shares is that their total quantity defines price per share. The only meanings to price per share are:
1. The price of one share represents the granularity with which you can buy and sell the company. As the GP says, in principle we could use a fixed granularity of a dollar instead, or of 1 cent, or of a Euro, or a troy ounce of gold, or whatever.
2. It provides a metric by which you can measure the change in share price. Even this is pretty loose, because again, the quantity of shares is changing over time as new shares are issued, old shares are bought back, etc. -- but in theory, buybacks and new share issuances are supposed to be neutral to the share value by themselves, and stock splits / merges are shown very vividly on stock charts.
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.
You could ask the same about H1-Bs.
The answer is apparently a resounding "no".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think he meant that one share of company X isn't necessarily the same percentage as one share of Y Inc.
Likewise, X might be at $12 and Y might be $500. Is Y better if it was at $600 last week and X was at 10? Could go either way.
Before I even read it I figured the article was a load of crap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm surprised Oracle haven't sued them for copying their business model.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
The question for an investor is how much profit can I make when these numbers change. It's not what a company is "actually" worth, since that seems to have so little influence on stock price. It's what a company is perceived to be worth. As we know, the market works not on reality, but on the perception of reality.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We should probably look at the total cost of the vehicle, including purchasing and insurance.
If you want to be a man and not a little boy, you can admit that you were wrong and should do your own homework before you judge others.
Geez, man why the abuse?
I worked briefly at Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1990s. I was feeling wistful from your comment about how much things had changed over the years, remembering when Yahoo was actually a king. (A friend of mine told me he remembers when Yahoo's address still contained stanford.edu.) Usenet, FTP, HotWired.com, Napster...
That seems to me like the real substance of this discussion. Anyways, thanks for your thoughts on Digital Equipment Corporation.
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Long live the dreamers, long live the net
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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