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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
Maybe that is because Amazon does what others only preach: putting the customer experience first. Whatever Amazon does, it is always motivated by this.
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
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
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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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.
...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.
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.
I can't see anything even in Incognito mode.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
185,000,000 volkswagon beetles
Sweet informative mod.
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.
That doesn't appear to be the case. 11 quarters of profit in a row.
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/...
BlameBillCosby.com
Why? Other than amazon basic batteries, i can buy everything else they sell a click away.
Even if we were to deny that what has happened with the internet going mainstream was revolutionary (which would be silly), doesn't the internet marketplace appear to be consolidating and ossifying to you? The limitations of printing and broadcasting kept things local and heterodox to an extent, but now those are consolidating while the internet was always easy to consolidate. Social networking has shown the importance of userbase to viability.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will two of them always be at war with the other one?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."