11 ms·
Maybe not right now, but I wouldn't ever underestimate Bezos. Musk and Bezos are both people I wouldn't bet against, but they're so drastically different in th
by BlackjackCF 9y ago
Maybe not right now, but I wouldn't ever underestimate Bezos.
Musk and Bezos are both people I wouldn't bet against, but they're so drastically different in their styles. Musk is flashy, but gets shit done. Bezos knows how to get shit done quietly... and suddenly he's dominated and bought everything around you.
- EduardoBautista 9y agoAmazon has a load of terrible products. Even their store is getting worse and worse. The fire phone was a complete flop. Amazon cloud drive and music are not at all at the same level as their competitors. Google Home is looking as though it's going to surpass the Echo. Amazon is successful because they are fine with taking losses, only just recently making a small amount of profit compared to their scale.
- BatFastard 9y agoIf you are not failing, then you are not trying enough new things. Amazon has been successful a lot, a LOT more often than they have failed.
- icelancer 9y agoI think that is probably false. They have way more failures than successes, but the successes far outpace the losses in output.
- fsloth 9y agoI think more failures than successes can be interpreted as a healthy appetite for product experimentation. The other option in todays world would be not to innovate except through purchases of established product families from other companies and acquisitions.
- justadeveloper2 9y agoAmazon phone, lol.
- BatFastard 9y agoSo yes the phone failed, but how about the 50 services they offer on AWS? Failures on their part are heavily publicized, but successes move along silently.
- gozur88 9y agoOr AWS itself. Doesn't seem like a good fit for a company like Amazon.
- paulcole 9y ago>Amazon is successful because they are fine with taking losses, only just recently making a small amount of profit compared to their scale. I thought this tired narrative was almost over? For decades Amazon chose to invest in infrastructure and logistics. Now they're "making a small amount of profit compared to their scale"? Who's at that same scale setting the bar for profit? Remember that "scale" doesn't equal revenue.
- boznz 9y agoEvery book I've bought for the past 8 years has been on kindle.. I don't think they're doing that bad..
- valuearb 9y agoThe Kindle is good and Echo is great. Every other hardware product they've ever made has been complete dogshit, which is why the packaging for most of them advises buyers to set them on fire.
- samat 9y agoWell, i know another company (G) with just 2 or 3 good products. Most others don't have even one.
- Super_Jambo 9y agoThe newer kindles are kinda shitty for the consumer, much better for Amazon no doubt. The switch to touch screen and adverts all over your library & store is really jarring. So much so that my tech friends now just buy second hand kindle 4s when their old ones break. It's possible that library lock in will stop them migrating away from kindles when the supply of kindle v4s runs out but not I think certain.
- vidarh 9y agoIf so, point them to Calibre. While I currently use the Kindle app to read my books, I have made it my "policy" to on each purchase ensure that I am still able to break the DRM and store a backup copy in a non-DRM'd format. The moment that changes, I'll stop buying Kindle books. Some purists would prefer to avoid buying DRM'd products in the first place (and I do when I have an alternative), but this is "second best" to me - I'll tolerate easily breakable DRM, but not one I can't remove. The upside is reduced lock-in - it may affect usability (the Kindle app is still the best reader app I've used for Android as well - if anyone has recommendations for any actually usable ebook reader Android apps I'm all ears) but I know I can read all my books on any device, using free/open apps.
- narrator 9y agoAmazon can fail a lot because money for private companies is a lot more expensive and harder to get than for public companies. Musk is playing on hard mode because he wants to retain control.
- gpawl 9y agoIt what sense does Bezos lack control? Being public means that the company is transparent, not that it is out of control.
- jimjimjim 9y agothat is completely not actual reality. it depends on who the investors/share holders are and the balance between lots of small investors and a few large investors. as long as investors see a way to make money out of the ceo (dividends or rock-star growth pushing share price up) they are happy. and all of that pushes thinking towards making targets for the quarter or year. and if it get's bad enough -> not enough money being made -> people being put on the board to mind things -> eventual ousting. do you want a visionary to spend their time thinking of the next great idea or how to keep the money people happy?
- bluGill 9y agoYou need both. A visionary alone needs the discipline that comes from having to choose which vision of many and finish it. A financial focused manager will never bet on any but the most obvious ideas and thus lose when someone else makes something work. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The least creative person has enough ideas to bankrupt even the biggest company if you start a team to implement them all as the idea occurs (a car obviously takes more people than a paper notepad, but you should expect to have all those ideas) A visionary who never thinks about money will eventually run out, or worse bounce between ideas and never finish one. The person who only thinks about money will not invest in the things required to continue making money. I've heard it stated that you need a visionary CEO and a close second who is a financial realist. The visionary has lots of great ideas, the financial realist reigns them in and forces the visionary to choose which vision(s) to focus on and finish; and let the others go. This works great until the visionary CEO steps down (dies, retires...), when you put the realist second in charge all the visionary projects are stopped, for a couple quarters the company makes more money, but there are no visionary things in the pipe so the company dies a slow death.
- ttam 9y agoPlug: why Amazon has a load of terrible products http://constantbetasoftware.com/2015/12/11/bezos-amazon-culture-of-experimentation.html http://constantbetasoftware.com/2015/12/11/bezos-amazon-cult...
- iknowicouldturn 9y agoI skimmed the video and read the notes. Pretty interesting. Makes sense.
- jondubois 9y agoI think Amazon cloud is a mixed bag of excellent and terrible. I love EC2 but not a big fan of their other more advanced services. I tried Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE... for IaaS and they just didn't have the same richness of features and flexibility as EC2.
- rainmouse 9y agoNot sure Google home is looking to surpass the Echo from here. http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/59123ef6dd089554518b45a6-1200/cotd59.png http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/59123ef6dd089554...
- taneq 9y agoMaybe, but how can you tell from that chart? It lists an overall delta and the current breakdown. There's no way to know the relative deltas.
- nabla9 9y agoWhat you describe is exactly how you come to dominate retail business and become monopoly power online. Amazon's reference point is Wal-Mart. They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business. Another good comparison in Microsoft in 80's and 90's. MS dominated over IBM, Apple and others several decades with sup-par product everybody hated by attacking and destroying potential competitors, not by improving products. Bezos knows what he is doing.
- snarfy 9y ago> They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business. If you sink all of your profits into expansion, then on the books you made zero profit. If you made zero profit, you pay zero taxes. This is a common tactic with farmers. They use this year's returns to buy next year's supplies. If amazon stopped growing and suddenly reaped their profits, there would be a big tax bill to go with it.
- sidlls 9y agoThere's a middle ground: don't grow as much, and pay some taxes. Not saying it's optimal (for any party, or on any axis), but it's not like there's just this binary choice of "growth consumes all profit" and "don't grow at all."
- gozur88 9y agoAt some point that will happen. Companies can't experience exponential growth indefinitely.
- samfisher83 9y agoThis isn't how accounting works. You can't just buy a warehouse and expense it in year one. You have to depreciate it overtime. You can look at their FCF its about 10 billion. Their market is 50x of that. For comparison walmart is ~20 billion and they are worth half of Amazon.
- walshemj 9y agoDo you think NT4 was a worse product that netware ?
- kamaal 9y agoThe guy who does 100 things and wins at 10 still comes out above the guy who does 2 things and wins at 2. This is despite the previous guy having a failure rate of 90% and latter guy having a success rate of 100%.
- Retric 9y agoDepends on the cost of failure and the benefits from winning. Fewer bets tends to mean larger bets which can pay off more.
- BatFastard 9y agoBeing the richest man in the world shows some level of success ;-) Also allows him room for a lot of failures.
- Retric 9y agoWell, he also has his stock in a company with a P/E ratio of 257.38, that's one very large bet. Cranking up earnings is clearly possible, but Amazon is also showing signs of imploding as for example people simply don't trust fulfilled by Amazon to mean anything.
- troyastorino 9y agoBlue Origin has turtles in it's coat of arms because the strategy is slow and steady...Bezos doesn't feel the need to compete on speed here.
- rl3 9y agoI'm neither an Amazon nor Bezos fan, but that ethos is something I respect. Rocketry isn't something you rush. Frankly I'm surprised SpaceX hasn't had more mishaps given the breakneck speed at which they operate.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoMost kinks of space travel were worked out in the '60s and spacex is pushing for reliability specifically, not for payload capacity - coincidentally that's where they're pushing the envelope and getting most of the failures.
- rl3 9y agoRegardless, designing a modern reusable launch platform isn't anywhere close to trivial.
- compton_effect 9y agoNot really. In the 60s we basically verified that certain rocket and engine designs work and that we could go beyond earth orbit. Creating a reliable, long lasting and reusable space rocket/vehicle is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more difficult. Just look at the Space Shuttle failure as an example of trying to do space on the cheap. Also, remember it took about 5% of the US GDP in the 60s to put men on the moon. I believe in Musk but trying to make space cheap is just simply a difficult problem and one I wished we funded more.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoShuttle is not a rocket tho. check out Saturn V failures instead.
- pbreit 9y agoNo, they don't compete now and probably never will. Yes, unwise to ever bet against either.
- agumonkey 9y agoI thought amazon was also a bubble of some kind, relying on aggressive growth to swallow the market and then change it's policies because it's unsustainable ? Musk seems a little more down to earth (sic) here.
- fastball 9y agoThat's more Uber than Amazon. Amazon didn't turn a profit for years because they were heavily reinvesting in more/better infrastructure (their "fulfillment centers") and services. One of the biggest services out of this reinvestment is AWS, which AMZN built for AMZN, and then realized it was such a good product they started selling it to others (also part of Bezos' ethos and their large initial costs: if you can't sell your internal tools to other people, you shouldn't be using it) However, Amazon is making a profit these days, and is still growing, so I think it's sustainable. Uber, meanwhile, is/has been subsidizing many/most rides with VC money in order to get market share, which is an entirely different thing and more in line with your perception.