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How Amazon Became Corporate America's Nightmare (bloomberg.com)
Zorro shares a report from Bloomberg that details Amazon's rapid growth in the last three years: Amazon makes no sense. It's the most befuddling, illogically sprawling, and -- to a growing sea of competitors -- flat-out terrifying company in the world. It sells soap and produces televised soap operas. It sells complex computing horsepower to the U.S. government and will dispatch a courier to deliver cold medicine on Christmas Eve. It's the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits than Southwest Airlines Co., which as of this writing ranks 426th. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person, his fortune built on labor conditions that critics say resemble a Dickens novel with robots, yet he has enough mainstream appeal to play himself in a Super Bowl commercial. Amazon was born in cyberspace, but it occupies warehouses, grocery stores, and other physical real estate equivalent to 90 Empire State Buildings, with a little left over. The company has grown so large and difficult to comprehend that it's worth taking stock of why and how it's left corporate America so thoroughly freaked out. Executives at the biggest U.S. companies mentioned Amazon thousands of times during investor calls last year, according to transcripts -- more than President Trump and almost as often as taxes. Other companies become verbs because of their products: to Google or to Xerox. Amazon became a verb because of the damage it can inflict on other companies. To be Amazoned means to have your business crushed because the company got into your industry. And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it's easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years.
Bezos clearly does NOT subscribe to the "maximize shareholder value" religion, and is not running Amazon as the typical modern "paper clip maximizer" that so many corporations have become. Instead, he emphasizes quality service, low prices, and acts (horrors!) as if customers are people and not simply cows to be milked.
The result is, if I need something, I check Amazon FIRST, and frequently last, as well.
Modern corporations would do well to learn from Amazon, instead of quaking in terror.
Amazon's core competency is logistics. They're the ultimate middle-man. If you're a middle-man of any sort, then you're likely to fear Amazon entering your industry. I'm just waiting for them to get into brokering finance and real estate, then the economy will REALLY freak out.
Once machine learning gets better, the same software can be redeployed into ANY market, to outcompete humans (think AlphaGo learning Chess recently). Sure, you may not have a robo-realtor better than the best 5% of human realtors. But you don't need to beat the fifth percentile, you only need to beat the 50th percentile. At that point, no human-based operation will be able to compete.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
But as long as I can get my wine, clothes and stuff delivered for free to my porch, I'm OK with their fears.
"the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years"
If you think that you've been sleeping for a long time. Amazon was never about profits and always about taking over markets. The day they moved beyond bookselling was the day that other retailers (and manufacturers) should have awakened.
...omphaloskepsis often...
https://www.theonion.com/my-advice-to-anyone-starting-a-business-is-to-remember-1819585065
Amazon these days is AWS and a bunch of side projects paid for by AWS profits.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
He just looks too much like Elmer Fudd.
#DeleteChrome
Okay, so it's a big company, a monster, a whatever.
What's the news again? This has been known for years.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Bezos is on his way to becoming a Bond/ (or better, Austin Powers) supervillian, armed with his pet Alexa to spy on every home and control all their contents, drones to drop stuff on their heads, they just need to get into automated driving industry now, ha ha ha ha.
And now it's a "sensational" news outlet!
Maybe that is because Amazon does what others only preach: putting the customer experience first. Whatever Amazon does, it is always motivated by this.
It's the logical outcome of "free-market" policies.
How much is it in One World Trade Centers?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Something that I've seen happen time and again with a lot of companies is the gutting and outsourcing of anything they don't regard as their "core competency". This reduces their corporate risk (easy to squeeze or drop a supplier in hard times) but it is insidious, and consumes the company from the inside. Eventually they are left with no competencies in anything except outsourcing and financial engineering.
So many of the individuals I work with are from the big outsourcing and management consultancy firms. It's everything from technical specialists, hr personnel, project managers and right up to fairly senior management. Some firms are little more than procurement and accounting departments with a brand, they don't actually have the skills/knowledge to do anything any more.
Amazon goes the other way. It is constantly insourcing things, and building up it's own skills in any field where it thinks it can do better than the existing suppliers. It treats things like the web store and the video service as it's first customer to get things started and drive development, and then spins round and makes it open. AWS is the obvious and most visible one, but their warehouse and logistics arm (certainly here in the UK) and even the web store are increasingly just a service that other people use to sell their stuff. I'd say about half the things I buy on amazon are sold by a third party but shipped from an Amazon warehouse by an Amazon Logistics delivery person.
This is why buying Wholefoods should terrify the entire food industry, and not just their direct retail competitors. Wholefoods is their new "first customer" for the supply chain management and sourcing of perishable goods and groceries, something they've struggled with scaling in the past. Once they turn all the back end systems (tech and people) into a service provided to Wholefoods retail, they will probably once again make it a service that other smaller retailers can tap into, and also use it to juice up other services like Amazon Pantry and Subscribe and Save.
They are prepared to take on almost anything and have a go, even if it ultimately fails (see the Fire Phone). Meanwhile much of the rest of the corporate world is taking the low risk, slow growth route powered by financial engineering where execs are more concerned with pointless mergers and restructuring than about actually doing anything concrete.
Paul Leader
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What's up?
I got my degree at Amazon.
...
What's different here is that Amazon is aiming to become a completely new kind of monopoly, not like the product monopolies we're familiar with, but a platform monopoly. And not just on one platform, but all of them: Online shopping, retail shopping, video streaming, cloud computing, disaster recovery, you name it, they'll eventually go after it. Also, relevant Onion article:
https://www.theonion.com/my-ad...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Every corporation dreams of having reach like Amazon.
The "how" of it is pretty simple, though: dumping. Amazon has yet to turn a profit, so they are clearly doing literally everything below cost. Last I heard, that was dumping. They're just burning money in order to gain dominance.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
and its business model is taking away the positives of what Whole Foods did.
There's nothing positive about what Whole Foods did. It was an immoral corporation like any other, selling overpriced crap to gullible rubes. The kinds of morons who think that buying a couple asparagus stems in a bottle of water for $6 will somehow make them healthier.
Whatever Amazon does with Whole Foods can only be an improvement.
This is nothing new. It's exactly what the supermarkets did to specialist stores like butchers, bakers, etc. Provide one place for the customer to get almost everything they need and specialist retailers get squeezed.
Amazon makes no or low profit.
Every company should.
aaaaaaa
"It's the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits than Southwest Airlines Co.,
In a nutshell it is an acquisition corporation combined with the fact that how you manage your high tech information technology in service industries efficiently is more important than profits if you are going to serve customers and grow your product lines. Walmart is the next fodder for the Bezos juggernaut they just don't see the importance of information technology and their online presence and service sucks for that very reason. Canadian Tire is another corp that could see problems, Best Buy after screwing up and over expanding brick and mortar in Canada is already in a world of hurt for the very same reasons. Target became a target and shuttered a shitload of stores because of a poor grasp of the growing importance of web tech in retail and service industries. Soon brick and mortar will become cheap so we might even see a slump in commercial real estate that leads to old malls and stores becoming housing. Which in a great many places would not be that bad of an outcome. Especially in places like Vancouver where employees working for minimum wage retail and service industries like Walmart and Best Buy cannot even afford to rent a shit house basement suite!!!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
They went after to manage all 3, cheap, good (enough) AND fast.
After years of re-investing basically all profit in logistics they are hard to beat.
By inviting other companies to their market place, they basically have all data of all other sellers.
Then they take the high profit products and make Amazon copies, taking the profit.
Amazon entering any market is the online equivalent of Walmart opening next door to your little shop.
50 comments should be here. I don't see any. Weird.
We know how it's going to end, Amazon is basically BNL from Wall-E.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Corporate America systematically reduced its tax burden and transferred it to individuals. It took the liberties and freedom guaranteed to the living citizens. "Corporations are People!". "Spending money is speech!". "Corporations can claim to have religious beliefs!".
There is a border and building a wall to keep out living people enjoys support from a swath of people. There is no border for corporations. Any foreign person, or even the foreign government, can found a company in USA and get all the protections and rights guaranteed by our constitution.
After betraying everyone, and after spending down all the good will, and after looting the middle class to the point of irrationality where they are voting to hurt themselves,.... what do you expect?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They use profits from one sector to automate and maybe under price in an other until they conquer that sector too. Repeat.
New things are always on the horizon
Amazon will need split but not geographically. Rather by market area.
This will be harder to legislate than the AT&T breakup to Baby Bells
"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell."
What makes Amazon a formidable competitor is the will to grow -- not profit, but grow. This is a natural phase that any startup normally goes through, but unlike a regular business Amazon never settled down to the business of maximizing profit; instead it metastasizes into additional business areas.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I posted a comment in this thread a couple of hours ago, no sign of it here or on my user page yet. Thread title showed around 30 posts at that time, now 60. What's going on?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As far as I can tell, Amazon is a logistics and service company. They feel they can apply their techniques to almost any product or service type.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
./ $hits the bed again...(403 - Forbidden).
But I remember when sites used to get Slashdotted :-)
Maybe all of these companies with higher profit margins than Amazon should be reinvesting more of those profits towards their long term viability instead of fixating on quarterly earnings and shareholder dividends. These companies have the resources to compete, they're just afraid of the disruption it'll cause and investors tanking their stock because their growth was a few tenths of a percent off of what they predicted.
Amazon is massive, and has been growing fast, and is in a lot of different markets, but they're starting to show some of the limits to sudden growth.
Their Amazon Prime service is getting less reliable. Last year, I could completely rely on two-day shipping for pretty much anything I ordered, but I'm seeing more and more missed or late orders. The search functions for products are, well, inaccurate in many cases. They're also (according to who you talk to) either losing money, or not making anywhere near enough profit margin.
While I enjoy getting things fast and relatively cheap, we're probably going to see some shrinkage of Amazon's power in the physical world - while Amazon Web Services will keep on expanding.
The good news is, they're not Google - who seems to have turned "don't be evil" into "evil is relative." I'd rather have a very powerful company that sells me stuff for low prices than a very powerful company that decides what I need to know, based off of random political beliefs of people I might not agree with.
Making money is for chumps. Growing equity and convincing other people that you're worth a lot is the new way.
If you take the profit and invest, you can throw all sorts of things at the wall and see what sticks. When it sticks, you're stuck with it.
Nothing Amazon has done couldn't have been done by any other established company, they just refused to do so.
...they know nothing of the size and scope of its cloud. Putting IBM, Google, etc. to shame.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Amazon got nothing compared to Alibaba / Taobao
Why did they break the comment section? That was the best part of the site!!!
If you want an insight into why Amazon is so different and so unlike any other company, you only need to look at their 1997 cover letter to their investors which has been added to every other investor letter since. A quote from the letter: "It’s All About the Long Term We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital." (Source: https://www.amazon.com/p/featu... - 1997 letter is at the end) Unlike most companies, which concentrate on shareholder value or profit or margins, Amazon is focused on one thing and one thing only. BEING THE MARKET LEADER ANY MARKET THEY ENTER. At any cost. Seriously; they care less about profit than they do about being number one in anything they do, no matter what. How do you compete with someone when their only mode is 'full out'? When the only thing they care about is beating you, even if it costs them profit to do so? There's an excellent video that explains this strategy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Reword it:
It lets users buy what they want, when they want it, at a decent price.
Shocking that in this day and age, someone considers that a "scary" business plan.
My workplaces were spending tens of thousands a year on Amazon... ten years ago. And now there's Amazon for Business, they can centrally manage it.
Older people, not necessarily au fait with technology, are always shocked when I say "Have you tried looking on Amazon?" Everything from jars of sweets for a community event to hot tubs to laptops to videos to music to telephones to spare batteries for their old phone to garden houses to board games to new plastic drawers for their freezer to parts for their car to envelopes. They don't consider that one place can sell all that.
But, is it that shocking? I don't remember ever reading in books when I was younger where they discussed a future where "You'd still have to go to ten different shops to buy things". It was always "You can have all your shopping delivered, and parts for your car, and get it all from one place, and be charged automatically for your purchase straight out of your bank account without leaving the comfort of your own home!!!". We knew that that was what we wanted 50 years ago. Amazon delivered it (pun intended).
I think it's only a shock if you never sat and thought about it. To me, though it was surprising to find someone actually doing it, it was more a case of "about bloody time". I work for a school, the Amazon account has no less than 50 different names on it because it's used for every department - from hundreds of iPads down to a box of paperclips.
Rename Amazon to "Global MegaCorp" and you wouldn't notice the difference. We've been talking about it since we ever started imagining the future. And while users benefit, they will win. They can't just ramp up prices now they have the custom, even after everyone else goes. A competitor would still sweep in and remove them if they tried, and it would start in one niche and then grow like Amazon did (remember when they only did books?).
Personally, while it's beneficial to everyone, who cares? So long as they pay tax, I get the product I want cheaply, the seller sells enough to make profit and the middle-men make their money delivering, who cares? Little tiny local specialist shops are dying for a reason. Nobody cares, while they can get the same stuff more conveniently. They may pay lip-service to "supporting the local shops" but they just want the product, really. If they wanted the atmosphere, they'd pay for entry to the shop, not the product they sell.
Just use the words from Terminator
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever
Except this time, it's not Ahnold -- it's Ahmazon
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The best part of this whole thing is that other companies laughed at Amazon for losing massive amounts of money during its first 7 or so years of existence and used its early performance as an excuse why they should avoid moving to internet sales.
Who's laughing now?
(It's almost like Bezos planned it that way, eh?)
meh
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Sounds like Futurama. Maybe Bezos is an ancestor of Mom.
In any case, this is an interesting sort of dichotomy; fierce competition among corporations is great for consumers and the general public, as it drives prices down and the availability of services and features up, as these corporations seek to out posture each other for your business; right up until it winds up putting thousands of jobs on the chopping block as smaller corporations fall like dominoes to the juggernaut that is Amazon. Though to be fair and give full disclosure as a consumer, I'm a fan of Amazon and Amazon Prime.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Amazon isn't a retail company. They aren't a hosting company, or a media production company... They are a logistics company.
Amazon follows a loose definition of the term "logistics" compared to most others in the field, but it's what they do best. They handle distribution of high volumes of goods, and they happen to handle order placement as well, just to keep their shipping volumes up. They also handle information logistics, with huge server farms and highly-scalable systems to handle their own information needs... and they just happen to sell off their capacity and capabilities, as well.
They are essentially logistics at scale, which allows them to move in industries at extremely low cost, since a large expense in most industry changes is figuring out the logistics of a new enterprise.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I can't see anything even in Incognito mode.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
....didn enfant terrible Thomas Piketty talk about growing wealth disparities ossifying capital structures making it impossible for anyone to break in or bring about transformative change without some sort of cataclysmic war or revolution?
He was pretty certain about that, as I recall.
-Styopa
being Wal- Marted. Only in cyberspace. And I hope Amazon crushes Wal Mart.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Amazon is becoming the dominant player in the emerging natural monopoly of retail. Like telecoms, their network of distribution is where their value lies. The bigger you get, the better the network, the less likely to see competitors.
This was a disaster for consumers in telecom.
It is already imploding. Just the other day went for an interview there - five SJW buttholes didn't even read my resume. The whole interviewing at amazon is a farce to hide an ulterior motive - outsource jobs.
That sort of interview normal for technical jobs in general. The point of your resume is to get a phone call, and it really has no value beyond that - it has done its job and gotten past the arbitrary whims of HR. Sometimes a manager will grill you on something specific on your resume just to see if you're blatantly lying, but that's as far as that goes.
The actual interview process for tech in general is "OK, now prove you've got the chops". There are no end of pretty resumes, but nothing in a resume actually means you can do the work.
That being said, Amazon's interview process for developers seems to err on the side of too many soft-skill questions and a lack of deep probing of actual coding talent. It's the opposite of the problem Google has, in my experience, with Google interviews being 100% technical and not so much as a back-and-forth design discussion to measure soft skills (Facebook was the same extreme as Google, but I last talked to them over 5 years ago, so maybe they've changed).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Why? Other than amazon basic batteries, i can buy everything else they sell a click away.
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Alright !! Let's get some less competitive options out there!
The makes movies and tv shows and streams content, does cloud computing and has defense contracts with the U.S. government....The point missed by morons is Amazon is unwieldy. A behemoth like GE in days past. Amazon will need to divest and spin off businesses in order to grow profits.
I would love to see them put all the swindling car dealers out of business
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On Amazon.com... yes, definitely. It takes logistics to do that though. To be able to pull off 2-day shipping and really make it work, and have people pay for it through Prime, is quite an accomplishment. But there are cracks in the armor. Notice how you get some of those shipments? Uber-like delivery people, using their own cars and they look quite run down, as if they are just delivering their hearts out. There is a price to those logistics, and I wonder how long it will last.
We will see how it goes with other things. Think of the Amazon streaming service. I have it and Netflix, and Amazon is nowhere near as good in pretty much all respects. But the funny thing is, Netflix runs on AWS. So no matter what, Amazon wins.
I always get a little cautious when I have a single go-to place. It used to be newegg for electronics, but they've slipped in recent years. Amazon has taken a piece of that for sure, but it can be a little overwhelming navigating all the products. And the review system is more than questionable wheras I thought neweggs was great. I have almost pulled the trigger on something on Amazon before, only to check the item's company website to find it available for cheaper. I still try to support websites when I can, and when I am not in a rush and their 1-2 week turnaround is acceptable. I have definitely found places that have a much nicer customer experience than Amazon. Amazon just makes it easy.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Will two of them always be at war with the other one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
WTF?
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) lays this entire saga out bare. Already, by then, many of Amazon's core tactics were old news.
But apparently, a lot of people out there were somehow living in their own personal reality distortion clouds: somehow perceiving Amazon through their "ah, it's so cute!" man-eating baby-broccoli peril-impervious sun shades.
Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: Books aren't just commodities — 2014
Here's the reference:
Amazon and publisher Hachette end dispute over online book sales — 2014
In a recent anthology, Words Are My Matter (2016), she talks about how much she anguished over writing that speech, essentially biting the hand that granted her that award. But she decided, in the end, that she meant every last work of it. Amazon actually had themselves their own table at that ceremony, where they sat stiff and thin-lipped during Le Guin's oratory.
Walmart is an IT company disguised as a retailer. They really do good IT, but they did not seem to pivto to web quickly enough. They are more old school IT, databases and automation.
I wouldn't count them out. They seem to be pivoting quickly now and building up momentum.
Cheap storage VM.
For rural residents like me, Amazon is a godsend.
For many items, especially tech, it's Amazon or nothing, and there are tens of millions of people in the same boat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...