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It feels like amazon's fundamental strength is dealing with price sensitive customers and running margin business with extremely thin margins.
by placeybordeaux 10y ago
It feels like amazon's fundamental strength is dealing with price sensitive customers and running margin business with extremely thin margins.
- nebabyte 10y agoThat's one of their strengths - a company as large as Amazon can easily spread itself into multiple concerns without endangering its core business. They can even shut out competition by adding new Prime benefits for various services. Even the risk is mostly offloaded to existing companies. All Amazon has to do is wait to see what is viable/sustainable, figure out how to undercut their competition (likely their own customers on AWS), and essentially reach out and take "the rest of the pie" from those customers. It's brilliant.
- deepnotderp 10y agoBut high level applications customers aren't usually price sensitive, if Amazon tries to compete with its customers and fails, then they'll leave, to someone like Google cloud.
- 013a 10y agoIt is brilliant. But their track record doesn't seem to be all that great. They add services to Prime like Video and Music, but their competition is still around. No one is leaving Netflix or Spotify. More importantly, the main reason to pay for Prime is shipping. The rest are value-adds that might dissuade someone from unsubscribing, but I just don't think many people think "Wow, I need to pay for Prime Video!" Their SaaS offerings on AWS are the same. Do people get excited about Quicksight, WorkDocs, or WorkMail? Not that I've seen. They have customers. People use them. But compared to their crown jewels; EC2, S3, SQS, Lambda... they're nothing. Amazon will inevitably try to expand upward. But I see it being as successful as Prime Music or Amazon Cloud Drive. Its too much "can we do this" and not enough "should we do this".