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This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazo

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

smt88 9y ago
I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market. Amazon may end up like Uber: forcing competitors to upgrade their technology, but not succeeding in stamping the competitors out entirely.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  > I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market. Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value... Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS. In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US. There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible. Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    There are more than two competitors to AWS when you look at "cloud" in the broader sense. First, of the "major", in addition to Microsoft and Google, you have IBM. There is also Red Hat. And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage. That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS. Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Azure is a better service imho, but is it actually succeeding? I'd argue it is not, yet.
      - smt88 9y ago
        https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/17/microsoft-azure-revenue-reportedly-exceeded-2-5-billion-in-2016/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/17/microsoft-azure-revenue-r...
        KirinDave 9y ago
        It's not even in the same order of magnitude as the sales of AWS.
      - Kocrachon 9y ago
        Better service? That is highly arguable. What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration. Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS. Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity. Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE. Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.
        9y ago
  - sib 9y ago
    You may be interested in some history related to United Airlines [itself an agglomeration of many airlines], Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, Sikorsky Helicopters, and others, which all used to be part of the same organization. They were broken up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
eli 9y ago
> That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.
- talmand 9y ago
  I recall a story about one vendor deciding it would be more profitable to separate from Wal-Mart and take the declining sales hit versus the dictated profit margin. I believe it was a lawn mower company?
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Snapper mowers. https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
    - ControlledBurn 9y ago
      Interesting read, though it would appear that's no longer the case: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_1102182_1225352_1218916 https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_11...
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        Threads like this give me hope for this website. Thanks' to everyone for excellent morning reading.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - joezydeco 9y ago
        But what happens a lot of times is that the US company will produce a low-cost version in China and sell that exclusively in Wal-Mart. Not sure if this is the case with Snapper (article doesn't say), but that's typically how they get back into the stores.
jandrese 9y ago
It just seems kind of petty to me. One senses a bit of bitterness on the part of Wal*Mart over this decision.
hunterjrj 9y ago
Can you expand a bit on your suggestion that Amazon is approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status? Are you speaking specifically about AWS?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  AWS is definitely a worry, as increasingly it's the fabric american business is woven from. Shutting that down or raising its prices suddenly would severely disrupt US business. But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.
  - Kocrachon 9y ago
    Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales currently. But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba. If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash. Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cholantesh 9y ago
>Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Yes. And I'd agree. To wax metaphorical, I'd rather the monsters devour each other while we race for a super-weapon to defeat all monsters and protect real people. This situation where corporations are effectively replacing the state is not exactly what I had in mind when I said the world would be a better place with a diminished role of the State in individual life.
  - arthulia 9y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you did mean by 'diminished role of the state', and what you imagined?
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    I like the term empath75 uses to describe this situation - 'corporate feudalism', because it really does feel like lords battling for power and influence, while an increasingly impotent state looks on doing little more than wagging its finger.
  - TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Counterpoint: I like shopping at Amazon. I used to work there too, but I liked it prior to working there, and continued to like it after I quit. And I think it would be very difficult for a company to offer the level of convenience and good UX that Amazon does at a much smaller scale. For example, part of why they can get very fast shipping down to a reasonable price is their huge network of distribution centers + their size giving them leverage in negotiations with UPS/Fedex/et al. If you split Amazon into a dozen smaller companies, the overall customer experience would likely be worse.
  - Asooka 9y ago
    The only way you can prevent feudalism is by preventing accretion of power. Otherwise, it's a positive feedback loop through and through - the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. How exactly to do that is up for debate, and I see socialist democracy plus regulated capitalism as the most practical current answer. Unfortunately it's not a stable position and is prone to failing if any one side can't be kept in check by the others.
deegles 9y ago
Wal-Mart is "powerful" but Amazon is "immoral"? Can you elaborate on how moral you think Wal-Mart is?
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Also immoral. I didn't think I would be accused of a pro-Walmart stance in a post that lead off with "It is bad WM can do this."
dkrich 9y ago
I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's value proposition for Prime is going to diminish.
- elif 9y ago
  where is that pressure represented in this chart? AWS total revenue is less than a year's growth. Wal-Mart showing signs of desperation does not imply amazon's defeat. http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8bb4ef-1200-900/20160129_amazon_bi.png http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8...
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    I agree. Conceptually Amazon has competitors in every field. They just don't seem to be denting Amazon's growing control.
  - dkrich 9y ago
    Well, that chart only goes to 2015. But in any case, ecommerce and web services are growing businesses, so naturally the growth has been huge looking back. But looking forward, Azure is presenting itself as a greater challenge to AWS each day and all retailers are getting smarter about ecommerce, taking cues from Amazon. Amazon has a huge lead in ecommerce and web services, but it's going to diminish. Prime video is a sinkhole of money. I get that they're using that to attract people to Prime, but it's a massive investment and if profits in other businesses start shrinking, they will be screwed.
- bflesch 9y ago
  Valid point. I don't know why techies always like trying to fuck over (or over scrutinize) the tech companies they know/hear most about, while many offline-first companies never appear on our radar..
shakestheclown 9y ago
That second paragraph I have read in almost the same form about Wal-mart in the past.
- tyleraldrich 9y ago
  I actually thought he wrote "Walmart" at the start. The same paragraph certainly applies to both, funnily enough.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    I don't disagree with that assertion about Wal-Mart either. The only bright spot in this mess is that these two titans are limiting each other's growth while less outrageously sized entities try to work out how to not have their economies completely rewired without a chance to react.
bedhead 9y ago
This kind of hyperbole is absolutely and demonstrably absurd. What a disgrace that this is the top comment.
- MadcapJake 9y ago
  > demonstrably absurd Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    I welcome the discussion.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Because it used words like "immoral monster" and "devour the economy" without actually backing any of it up with evidence.
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Those statements are obviously opinions. The evidence that I think they are such is before you. You're welcome to disagree, but don't demand I prove a moral judgement has been made, that's just silly.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    > Amazon is a massive immoral monster this should be enough > devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either > It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited. > Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off. > the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe. > I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors. That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation
lithos 9y ago
Walmart is also perfectly happy to run companies out of business by playing dirty by purposefully playing with orders and inventory. Which they have done to Field Crest when they refused to outsource to their chosen Chinese factories
water42 9y ago
>"It shouldn't be a big surprise that there are cases in which we'd prefer our most sensitive data isn't sitting on a competitor's platform, " he said, adding that it's a "small number." what is unreasonable about this? do you trust amazon?
- s73ver 9y ago
  It's not their data.
dv_dt 9y ago
Actually don't requirements like this that constrain vendor dealings outside of the two parties risk running afoul of existing "restraint of trade" antitrust laws? Or perhaps Wal-Mart is taking a calculated risk that this adminstration isn't going to pursue much along these lines anyway. Still it seems like Amazon itself could pursue damages directly if it desired (I'm no lawyer though..).
jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
Wal-Mart have always been pure bastards to their supply chain. My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked in the fabrication shop to sit in on meetings and reduce the intimidation BS. They are a ruthlessly scummy business and have been for a very long time.
- throwawaymanbot 9y ago
  This is how Wal-Mart maintains its position, and grows to where it is today. Thats Business at their level. I sympathize however. Strong Arming small and middle sized businesses, which are the bedrock of American Capitalist Power is just egregiously scummy. This is also what I think is currently gone wrong with the American Capitalism, but thats another comment, somewhere, sometime I guess :)
  - davidf18 9y ago
    But Amazon doesn't do this to their vendors.
    - throwaway2048 9y ago
      They most certainly do and have. Take Books and Ebooks for a good example. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words
      - davidf18 9y ago
        I was referring to these smaller firms as was addressed in the comment. Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.
socalnate1 9y ago
This encapsulates my feelings so well. I feel like I am watching King Kong and Godzilla fight it out and I don't really know who to root for since they are both going to destroy Hong Kong when they are done with each other.
ska 9y ago
Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Not so long ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about Walmart.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  And it's still true, at least in some parts of the country. There are places in the Midwest where Walmart is the only place a lot of people shop. There are towns in the southeast going broke in part because they're paying police to act as Walmart internal security. But I suppose two battling monsters beat one rampaging monster, at least.
- nebabyte 9y ago
  Because there was no Amazon to compare to at the time. Walmart's reach never once approached modern AZ's.
bassman9000 9y ago
vendor is free to enter in a relationship with WalMart. WalMart is free to dictate their terms, vendor too. No agreement, no deal, part ways. Explain how this is wrong.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The "freedom" is purely notional if your other option is to go out of business.
paulddraper 9y ago
Read "immoral" as "immortal". Maybe that's more accurate.
cat199 9y ago
> On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors. Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...

smt88 9y ago

I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market. Amazon may end up like Uber: forcing competitors to upgrade their technology, but not succeeding in stamping the competitors out entirely.

KirinDave 9y ago
> I've never heard of conglomerates being broken up, as long as they didn't have too much share of any single market. Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value... Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS. In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US. There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible. Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.
- mindcrime 9y ago
  There are more than two competitors to AWS when you look at "cloud" in the broader sense. First, of the "major", in addition to Microsoft and Google, you have IBM. There is also Red Hat. And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage. That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.
- gaius 9y ago
  Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS. Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Azure is a better service imho, but is it actually succeeding? I'd argue it is not, yet.
    - smt88 9y ago
      https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/17/microsoft-azure-revenue-reportedly-exceeded-2-5-billion-in-2016/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/17/microsoft-azure-revenue-r...
      - KirinDave 9y ago
        It's not even in the same order of magnitude as the sales of AWS.
    - Kocrachon 9y ago
      Better service? That is highly arguable. What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration. Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS. Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity. Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE. Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.
      - 9y ago
- sib 9y ago
  You may be interested in some history related to United Airlines [itself an agglomeration of many airlines], Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, Sikorsky Helicopters, and others, which all used to be part of the same organization. They were broken up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

eli 9y ago

> That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. Wal-Mart is pretty infamous for squeezing suppliers & vendors on price and operating procedures. Hard.

talmand 9y ago
I recall a story about one vendor deciding it would be more profitable to separate from Wal-Mart and take the declining sales hit versus the dictated profit margin. I believe it was a lawn mower company?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Snapper mowers. https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
  - ControlledBurn 9y ago
    Interesting read, though it would appear that's no longer the case: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_1102182_1225352_1218916 https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=Snapper&cat_id=5428_11...
    - KirinDave 9y ago
      Threads like this give me hope for this website. Thanks' to everyone for excellent morning reading.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - joezydeco 9y ago
      But what happens a lot of times is that the US company will produce a low-cost version in China and sell that exclusively in Wal-Mart. Not sure if this is the case with Snapper (article doesn't say), but that's typically how they get back into the stores.

jandrese 9y ago

It just seems kind of petty to me. One senses a bit of bitterness on the part of Wal*Mart over this decision.

hunterjrj 9y ago

Can you expand a bit on your suggestion that Amazon is approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status? Are you speaking specifically about AWS?

KirinDave 9y ago
AWS is definitely a worry, as increasingly it's the fabric american business is woven from. Shutting that down or raising its prices suddenly would severely disrupt US business. But secondary effects of lost sales from vendors would almost certainly upend the vendor table and make goods very difficult to get ahold of. Amazon as a delivery service (and its smile boxes, ads for its own products on said boxes, and specialized delivery frameworks) is as much of an American institution as the post office now, and growing as it takes over its own delivery and logistics.
- Kocrachon 9y ago
  Amazon accounts for 43% of online sales currently. But accounts for less than 5% of retail sales overall. Until they start hitting a bigger chunk of total sales, I would not consider them too big to fall. Walmart is too big to fall, as it litterally controls a bunch of local economies. If Amazon closed tomorrow, there would be a shitty time in Seattle, but people would just go to Ebay, Walmart, Etsy, and Alibaba. If WalMart closed tomorrow, a good chunk of the southern states would run into a state of emergency because the unemployment rate would skyrocket, and there would be no companies to pick up the slack locally, so local economies all across the US would crash. Many towns would lack groceries or supplies because WalMart is all they have after WalMart ran everyone else out of business. How many businesses has Amazon shut down across the entire US?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

cholantesh 9y ago

>Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year Hasn't the same thing been said about Walmart?

KirinDave 9y ago
Yes. And I'd agree. To wax metaphorical, I'd rather the monsters devour each other while we race for a super-weapon to defeat all monsters and protect real people. This situation where corporations are effectively replacing the state is not exactly what I had in mind when I said the world would be a better place with a diminished role of the State in individual life.
- arthulia 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you did mean by 'diminished role of the state', and what you imagined?
- cholantesh 9y ago
  I like the term empath75 uses to describe this situation - 'corporate feudalism', because it really does feel like lords battling for power and influence, while an increasingly impotent state looks on doing little more than wagging its finger.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Counterpoint: I like shopping at Amazon. I used to work there too, but I liked it prior to working there, and continued to like it after I quit. And I think it would be very difficult for a company to offer the level of convenience and good UX that Amazon does at a much smaller scale. For example, part of why they can get very fast shipping down to a reasonable price is their huge network of distribution centers + their size giving them leverage in negotiations with UPS/Fedex/et al. If you split Amazon into a dozen smaller companies, the overall customer experience would likely be worse.
- Asooka 9y ago
  The only way you can prevent feudalism is by preventing accretion of power. Otherwise, it's a positive feedback loop through and through - the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful. How exactly to do that is up for debate, and I see socialist democracy plus regulated capitalism as the most practical current answer. Unfortunately it's not a stable position and is prone to failing if any one side can't be kept in check by the others.

deegles 9y ago

Wal-Mart is "powerful" but Amazon is "immoral"? Can you elaborate on how moral you think Wal-Mart is?

KirinDave 9y ago
Also immoral. I didn't think I would be accused of a pro-Walmart stance in a post that lead off with "It is bad WM can do this."

dkrich 9y ago

I think concerns about Amazon becoming a monopoly are greatly exaggerated. They are getting attacked from all sides, by Microsoft in the cloud and Wal-Mart in ecommerce. As Microsoft grabs share from them in web services it'll reduce Amazon's ability to cross-subsidize its ecommerce business. As Wal-Mart and Costco continue to catch up in ecommerce and free two-day shipping becomes table stakes in ecommerce, Amazon's value proposition for Prime is going to diminish.

elif 9y ago
where is that pressure represented in this chart? AWS total revenue is less than a year's growth. Wal-Mart showing signs of desperation does not imply amazon's defeat. http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8bb4ef-1200-900/20160129_amazon_bi.png http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56abe654c08a80431d8...
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I agree. Conceptually Amazon has competitors in every field. They just don't seem to be denting Amazon's growing control.
- dkrich 9y ago
  Well, that chart only goes to 2015. But in any case, ecommerce and web services are growing businesses, so naturally the growth has been huge looking back. But looking forward, Azure is presenting itself as a greater challenge to AWS each day and all retailers are getting smarter about ecommerce, taking cues from Amazon. Amazon has a huge lead in ecommerce and web services, but it's going to diminish. Prime video is a sinkhole of money. I get that they're using that to attract people to Prime, but it's a massive investment and if profits in other businesses start shrinking, they will be screwed.
bflesch 9y ago
Valid point. I don't know why techies always like trying to fuck over (or over scrutinize) the tech companies they know/hear most about, while many offline-first companies never appear on our radar..

shakestheclown 9y ago

That second paragraph I have read in almost the same form about Wal-mart in the past.

tyleraldrich 9y ago
I actually thought he wrote "Walmart" at the start. The same paragraph certainly applies to both, funnily enough.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I don't disagree with that assertion about Wal-Mart either. The only bright spot in this mess is that these two titans are limiting each other's growth while less outrageously sized entities try to work out how to not have their economies completely rewired without a chance to react.

bedhead 9y ago

This kind of hyperbole is absolutely and demonstrably absurd. What a disgrace that this is the top comment.

MadcapJake 9y ago
> demonstrably absurd Please do demonstrate how it is absurd.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  I welcome the discussion.
- refurb 9y ago
  Because it used words like "immoral monster" and "devour the economy" without actually backing any of it up with evidence.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    Those statements are obviously opinions. The evidence that I think they are such is before you. You're welcome to disagree, but don't demand I prove a moral judgement has been made, that's just silly.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  > Amazon is a massive immoral monster this should be enough > devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Luddites repeat: automation, price reduction and job shifting isn't bad for the economy and it isn't worse either > It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Completely unsubstantiated. Surely it's one of the larger employees, but compared to automotive there are few satellites that lives because of the induced workload - if Ford closes, all subsidiaries and most vendor will close with it; if Amazon closes, the impact will be more limited. > Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this This is incredibly short sighted, since those were written at Rockefeller peak. Entities larger than this and more looming where at the order of the day, while Amazon has a load competitors and alternatives to fend off. > the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... This political climate endured for most USA history, with shortly timed bouts into centrism, hardly something current, hardly something that slowed down the USA economic growth. cfr - Europe. > I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors. That's ok tho, as in not a bad thing All in all the whole claim is conflated hyperbole that's filtered by an unhistorical view of the current situation

lithos 9y ago

Walmart is also perfectly happy to run companies out of business by playing dirty by purposefully playing with orders and inventory. Which they have done to Field Crest when they refused to outsource to their chosen Chinese factories

water42 9y ago

>"It shouldn't be a big surprise that there are cases in which we'd prefer our most sensitive data isn't sitting on a competitor's platform, " he said, adding that it's a "small number." what is unreasonable about this? do you trust amazon?

s73ver 9y ago
It's not their data.

dv_dt 9y ago

Actually don't requirements like this that constrain vendor dealings outside of the two parties risk running afoul of existing "restraint of trade" antitrust laws? Or perhaps Wal-Mart is taking a calculated risk that this adminstration isn't going to pursue much along these lines anyway. Still it seems like Amazon itself could pursue damages directly if it desired (I'm no lawyer though..).

jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago

Wal-Mart have always been pure bastards to their supply chain. My family had a small manufacturing business that went bankrupt years ago. At one point we were making a part that ultimately ended up on a WM product. Periodically WM's folks would come around and do a strong arm routine trying to renegotiate the contract. It got bad enough my dad adopted the habit of bringing a couple of the very burly folks that worked in the fabrication shop to sit in on meetings and reduce the intimidation BS. They are a ruthlessly scummy business and have been for a very long time.

throwawaymanbot 9y ago
This is how Wal-Mart maintains its position, and grows to where it is today. Thats Business at their level. I sympathize however. Strong Arming small and middle sized businesses, which are the bedrock of American Capitalist Power is just egregiously scummy. This is also what I think is currently gone wrong with the American Capitalism, but thats another comment, somewhere, sometime I guess :)
- davidf18 9y ago
  But Amazon doesn't do this to their vendors.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    They most certainly do and have. Take Books and Ebooks for a good example. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/cheap-words
    - davidf18 9y ago
      I was referring to these smaller firms as was addressed in the comment. Regarding the major book selling firms, Amazon are the good guys because a relatively few book firms control the market. Amazon is helping to improve the customer experience by lowering the price of books.

socalnate1 9y ago

This encapsulates my feelings so well. I feel like I am watching King Kong and Godzilla fight it out and I don't really know who to root for since they are both going to destroy Hong Kong when they are done with each other.

ska 9y ago

Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Not so long ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about Walmart.

Bartweiss 9y ago
And it's still true, at least in some parts of the country. There are places in the Midwest where Walmart is the only place a lot of people shop. There are towns in the southeast going broke in part because they're paying police to act as Walmart internal security. But I suppose two battling monsters beat one rampaging monster, at least.
nebabyte 9y ago
Because there was no Amazon to compare to at the time. Walmart's reach never once approached modern AZ's.

bassman9000 9y ago

vendor is free to enter in a relationship with WalMart. WalMart is free to dictate their terms, vendor too. No agreement, no deal, part ways. Explain how this is wrong.

emodendroket 9y ago
The "freedom" is purely notional if your other option is to go out of business.

paulddraper 9y ago

Read "immoral" as "immortal". Maybe that's more accurate.

cat199 9y ago

> On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they'd rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors. Could say the same thing about WalMart w/r/t local retail in rural America and now cities for the past 40 or so years...