10 ms·

Can Anyone Beat Jeff Bezos?

108 points by allenleein 9y ago

WisNorCan 9y ago
Apple iPhone seems to be doing quite well relative to Amazon’s Fire Phone. Also, Azure is doing surprisingly well relative to AWS despite a late start. Wouldn’t surprise me if Azure exceeded AWS in the near future. Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design And in the second enterprise.
- Osmium 9y ago
  > Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design Just design generally, including their website ... anecdotally, so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music. Apple has this discoverability problem too (Apple Music doesn't have a web UI, it might as well not exist if you can't install iTunes, and then Apple wonders why its social features don't take off). For its devices, Amazon also seems to share Google's general obliviousness, e.g. they just announced an alarm clock with a camera. Who wants a camera pointed at their bed all night? Their Fire Phone pioneered this over-expensive faux-3D UI, which on paper sounds great, but anybody could have said they weren't going to get the development support they needed to really sell it, and most users aren't going to care. Design is more than just veneer, you've got to make stuff that people want... Amazon's current approach seems to be "well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers."
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > Amazon's current approach seems to be "well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers." To be fair, there's also a (massive) market for that.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    The iPhone is an Apple Music client. That’s a pretty big installed base. The iPhone music client is not very good. Maybe that’s more of an issue than the lack of web client.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music. I know these things exist, but I don't use them much even as an Amazon Prime member. Why? Because Prime Video UX is poor compared to Netflix (and Netflix is no great shakes either, but it's better than Amazon), and Music has a pretty poor catalog and again a pretty poor UX.
    - usaphp 9y ago
      Prime video UI is really good on iPads and iPhones. And it has a much better video selection for kids. I wish they release an Apple TV app finally too.
    - Osmium 9y ago
      > and Netflix is no great shakes either And this is mostly because Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library. Hulu just had a recent, awful re-design too. They cover in-active thumbnails with gradients, you can barely see anything. Apple TV (which I like as among the best) also has a ridiculously unergonomic remote and very confusing UI (do I want to press "menu" or "home"? And now the TV app is 'home' by default, it's even weirder...somehow, even though I know I think how it works, I always seem to press the wrong one.) And no picture-in-picture either, though their processors are plenty fast enough to support it. But their standard built-in TVML-based interfaces are functional, if a little boring, and the UI is responsive. And hey, at least they aren't showing me ads in the UI or tracking what I watch. But still, lots of little problems. So much room for improvement here, by everyone.
      - bhollander823 9y ago
        What do you mean by "Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library"? Why would they intentionally create a worse user experience?
        aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
        Because their library gets smaller and smaller every year especially their library of non-Netflix produced content.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Apple isn't as awesome as they may once have been. They have made some controversial moves lately (headphone jack, MBPro keyboards, touchbar, The Notch, keeping an iPhone design that's going on 4 years, etc.). Also, the quality of iOS and MacOS has suffered a bit the past couple iterations. Way too buggy out of the gate! I still believe they make great products, just not as great as they have been.
Invictus0 9y ago
The problem with these new giants is that people really want them around. People don't care so much that their neighbors are going out of business; they just want their crap cheap and as soon as possible. The current legislative environment is entirely ill-equipped to deal with these companies, and moreover, no one even knows how to deal with them. What is clear, though, is that the proliferation of supercompanies like Amazon is repugnant to the ideals of the free market and must be stopped.
- sweettea 9y ago
  I have a lot of sympathy for this argument, but I don't think it's fleshed out enough. What happens to this argument if you do s/Amazon/Walmart/? I would generally hold Amazon is better than Walmart due to the relative decentralization of Amazon's sources (third parties can easily sell on Amazon, but not at Walmart). Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least without further tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart problem. Walmart is struggling --- a nimbler, more convenient competitor came along, and society also has a greater appreciation for specialty stores now. Will that happen to amazon too?
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I think that is part of why Amazon is so eager to automate all they can, because any newcomer will have to pay actual people, and won’t have the ability to invest in robotics.
  - Invictus0 9y ago
    > Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least without further tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart problem. You're proposing that the solution to "the Walmart problem" is to create a company even worse than Walmart, a company that drives other, larger companies out of business? Whereas Walmart put out the mom and pops, Amazon is putting out the Bestbuys and shopping malls. There is no difference. But people are celebrating this, and heralding a coming age where no one has to work (caused by Amazon-like processes and robots replacing retail workers and other jobs), without really considering the complete disaster that this would entail. The solution is not even more supercompanies.
kbos87 9y ago
I don’t think that the world can quite fathom how dangerous Amazon actually is to virtually every industry. When it comes to purveyors of physical goods, Amazon has the power to reshape the fabric of our streets and neighborhoods in ways few people can fathom. Say goodbye to grocery stores and ground floor retail if they get their way. They are just smart enough to do it slowly enough where they don’t have any jarring sudden impact. In tech, Amazon has tremendous power to put anyone they want out of business. AWS puts them in the enviable position of understanding all sorts of intimate details of everyone else’s business models. Again, they are too smart to do it too quickly. It pains me that my generation, a generation of people who dream of being makers and business owners, don’t see the irony of the convenience of having toilet paper delivered and lower prices at Whole Foods for what they really are - a trick and a trap that strengthens a company that can and will have a real tangible negative impact on everyone’s employment and business prospects in the future if hasn’t already.
- rtpg 9y ago
  I understand the dangers of monopoly, but I wish there was a stronger argument here. We've seen this sort of thing happen before, with Walmart. And none of these arguments worked! Walmart is big and dominant. It killed off smaller places, but people don't care because it has mostly everything and is cheap. "This convenient good thing is actually bad!" isn't super convincing I guess.... EDIT: the ultimate irony being that Walmart/Amazon are the "ideal endgame" of market capitalism. Razor-thin margins everywhere, people get things cheap. But how do you get cheap goods? Pressure suppliers, pay workers as little as possible. The _best case scenario_ for this economic model leads to a terrible status quo. And the only difference between this and other industries is the size of the slice of the pie the C-suite gets.
  - deevolution 9y ago
    We similarly give up our privacy in exchange for convenience. Even tho we know its bad, Its just too damn convenient and easy for the majority of the population.
  - refurb 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
txmx2000 9y ago
This is why this “net neutrality” nonsense is so dangerous. It’s an invented issue meant to weaken the FTC by transfering the power to regulate the internet to a government agency that doesn’t have anti-trust authority. The FTC made Amazon possible because, in the 2000s, it used anti-trust to keep local and state governments from taxing and outlawing internet sales of products. Now that Amazon is powerful, it’s lobbying to prevent the same power from being used against it. This is what net neutrality was created for. Nobody wants to slow down your Netflix.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
> Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook have remade the economy in their image. So what happens if they turn on each other? um ... aren't they supposed to turn on each other? isn't that, like, capitalism, and competition and stuff?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rglover 9y ago
Moral of the story? Become a master of logistics.
Steko 9y ago
The answer is Xi Jinping although the article doesn't mention China at all.
- adventured 9y ago
  Craigslist (classifieds). Google (search). eBay (auctions). Apple etc (phones). PayPal etc (payment systems). Spotify/Apple etc (music). All businesses Amazon attempted and mostly failed at. Bezos - Amazon - has been beaten quite a few times.
nadim 9y ago
Likely MZ.
panabee 9y ago
if you're in the retail supply chain, you're at risk of destruction by amazon. lower prices mean more commerce flows through amazon, which strengthens the company. bezos evidently wasn't joking when he claimed, "your margin is my opportunity." for all the valid concerns about one company consolidating too much power, amazon is also effectively saving consumers hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. the margins of retail middlemen are being eaten by amazon and essentially pocketed by consumers or invested by amazon to eventually help consumers save or enjoy more. amazon fearmongering is easy and fashionable, but all policies hurt some and help others. it would be refreshing to read an unbiased analysis of the trade-offs society faces if amazon continues to devour retail.
earlybike 9y ago
It’s not about Amazon, it’s about the tendency that most online-based consumer businesses evolve into monopolies. Mostly through network effects paired with smart M&A. So, the question is not if anyone can beat Bezos but rather beat online monopolies in general.
- petey283 9y ago
  This. The article is just another example of media bias toward overarching narrative.
RestlessMind 9y ago
"Your margin is my opportunity" - with that kind of attitude, Bezos is indeed a tough competitor. However, what puzzles me the most is the fact that investors are letting Amazon chug along with barely any profits. Can someone please explain to me how Bezos is able to pull off a P/E of 240 for AMZN, when the company has been around for 20+ years and no longer considered a startup (i.e. no more hyper growth phase)? For comparison, other tech titans have P/E numbers as: FB (37), GOOG (36), MSFT (27), AAPL (17). Only NFLX (216) is in the same league as AMZN.
- adventured 9y ago
  The particularly big leap Amazon made in its market valuation, was actually one very specific thing: AWS. That tripled its market cap from ~$150 billion to where it's at now. Specifically when they started revealing how big it was, how fast it was growing, and the operating income numbers. December 2014, the stock was at $300. Now it's $959. Nearly all of that gain is from that single thing, speculation about its future worth that is. It's not the retail business or Echo or tablets or Kindle that did it. Those are not generating huge amounts of operating income. The market is appraising (drooling about) AWS as being worth an extraordinary sum. Businesses are typically valued based on future projected earnings. For AWS that might be akin to $50-60 billion in sales and $16 billion in operating income (with a very rich multiple given our current market bubble). 20x multiple on $16b in operating income, there's $320 billion of Amazon's $460 billion. I'm not arguing AWS should be worth that, I'm saying the very inefficient market, filled full of mediocre investors and fools, is saying it is. One could argue the future operating income estimate might be high, but the market is frothing at the mouth right now, we're one or two notches (on a 10 notch scale) away from entering a euphoric insanity again given the market's (eg S&P 500) extreme PE ratio presently. Throw in Kindle, Prime, Echo, Tablets on that AWS $300 billion valuation. The traditional retail business is being valued at maybe $50 to $80 billion right now. If you look at the operating income projections for Amazon for the next few years, analysts are forecasting it's going to skyrocket, and that's solely based on AWS. Here's what's really going to happen: severe disappointment. We've witnessing peak Amazon in terms of market valuation in this general time frame (whether that's $500x billion or $700 billion, this particular market bubble represents the highest valuation Amazon will have for the next ~15 years, something equivalent to the stagnation Microsoft's stock enjoyed post dotcom bubble). Bezos becoming the world's richest briefly, is equivalent to the economic bubble peaks when someone decides to build a new world's tallest skyscraper nicely timed with the next crash.
Feniks 9y ago
Amazon came a few years too late and couldn't offer anything that sets them apart from the competition (next day delivery is pretty standard fare for any web retailer here) so yeah they were beaten. Or rather they saw the battlefield and didn't engage. THAT is what made Amazon big in the US: they were first. Nothing magical about it really. But I think my country was one of the few that already had established players. Oh there's China ofcourse, they are forerunners with ecommerce. The future belongs to Alibaba. Same with the supermarket delivery stuff, that's already been around for years. Don't understand the fuss. I have the feeling a lot of retail in the US missed to catch on to the internet. Bezos became a god partially through incompetent competition.
williamle8300 9y ago
Like... physically?
davidf18 9y ago
New York State (and some other states) are helping Amazon to replace brick and mortar stores by having unreasonable minimum wage levels. The level in NYS is $11 (I think) going to $13 and then $15. There have already been significant increases in the cost of food in grocery stores, but that is probably true of much of retail.
bootcat 9y ago
Once they said Jeff is the worst CEO alive !!, now things are getting a change !

108 points by allenleein 9y ago

Apple iPhone seems to be doing quite well relative to Amazon’s Fire Phone. Also, Azure is doing surprisingly well relative to AWS despite a late start. Wouldn’t surprise me if Azure exceeded AWS in the near future. Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design And in the second enterprise.

Osmium 9y ago
> Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design Just design generally, including their website ... anecdotally, so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music. Apple has this discoverability problem too (Apple Music doesn't have a web UI, it might as well not exist if you can't install iTunes, and then Apple wonders why its social features don't take off). For its devices, Amazon also seems to share Google's general obliviousness, e.g. they just announced an alarm clock with a camera. Who wants a camera pointed at their bed all night? Their Fire Phone pioneered this over-expensive faux-3D UI, which on paper sounds great, but anybody could have said they weren't going to get the development support they needed to really sell it, and most users aren't going to care. Design is more than just veneer, you've got to make stuff that people want... Amazon's current approach seems to be "well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers."
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > Amazon's current approach seems to be "well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers." To be fair, there's also a (massive) market for that.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  The iPhone is an Apple Music client. That’s a pretty big installed base. The iPhone music client is not very good. Maybe that’s more of an issue than the lack of web client.
- ams6110 9y ago
  > so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music. I know these things exist, but I don't use them much even as an Amazon Prime member. Why? Because Prime Video UX is poor compared to Netflix (and Netflix is no great shakes either, but it's better than Amazon), and Music has a pretty poor catalog and again a pretty poor UX.
  - usaphp 9y ago
    Prime video UI is really good on iPads and iPhones. And it has a much better video selection for kids. I wish they release an Apple TV app finally too.
  - Osmium 9y ago
    > and Netflix is no great shakes either And this is mostly because Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library. Hulu just had a recent, awful re-design too. They cover in-active thumbnails with gradients, you can barely see anything. Apple TV (which I like as among the best) also has a ridiculously unergonomic remote and very confusing UI (do I want to press "menu" or "home"? And now the TV app is 'home' by default, it's even weirder...somehow, even though I know I think how it works, I always seem to press the wrong one.) And no picture-in-picture either, though their processors are plenty fast enough to support it. But their standard built-in TVML-based interfaces are functional, if a little boring, and the UI is responsive. And hey, at least they aren't showing me ads in the UI or tracking what I watch. But still, lots of little problems. So much room for improvement here, by everyone.
    - bhollander823 9y ago
      What do you mean by "Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library"? Why would they intentionally create a worse user experience?
      - aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
        Because their library gets smaller and smaller every year especially their library of non-Netflix produced content.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Apple isn't as awesome as they may once have been. They have made some controversial moves lately (headphone jack, MBPro keyboards, touchbar, The Notch, keeping an iPhone design that's going on 4 years, etc.). Also, the quality of iOS and MacOS has suffered a bit the past couple iterations. Way too buggy out of the gate! I still believe they make great products, just not as great as they have been.

Invictus0 9y ago

The problem with these new giants is that people really want them around. People don't care so much that their neighbors are going out of business; they just want their crap cheap and as soon as possible. The current legislative environment is entirely ill-equipped to deal with these companies, and moreover, no one even knows how to deal with them. What is clear, though, is that the proliferation of supercompanies like Amazon is repugnant to the ideals of the free market and must be stopped.

sweettea 9y ago
I have a lot of sympathy for this argument, but I don't think it's fleshed out enough. What happens to this argument if you do s/Amazon/Walmart/? I would generally hold Amazon is better than Walmart due to the relative decentralization of Amazon's sources (third parties can easily sell on Amazon, but not at Walmart). Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least without further tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart problem. Walmart is struggling --- a nimbler, more convenient competitor came along, and society also has a greater appreciation for specialty stores now. Will that happen to amazon too?
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I think that is part of why Amazon is so eager to automate all they can, because any newcomer will have to pay actual people, and won’t have the ability to invest in robotics.
- Invictus0 9y ago
  > Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least without further tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart problem. You're proposing that the solution to "the Walmart problem" is to create a company even worse than Walmart, a company that drives other, larger companies out of business? Whereas Walmart put out the mom and pops, Amazon is putting out the Bestbuys and shopping malls. There is no difference. But people are celebrating this, and heralding a coming age where no one has to work (caused by Amazon-like processes and robots replacing retail workers and other jobs), without really considering the complete disaster that this would entail. The solution is not even more supercompanies.

kbos87 9y ago

I don’t think that the world can quite fathom how dangerous Amazon actually is to virtually every industry. When it comes to purveyors of physical goods, Amazon has the power to reshape the fabric of our streets and neighborhoods in ways few people can fathom. Say goodbye to grocery stores and ground floor retail if they get their way. They are just smart enough to do it slowly enough where they don’t have any jarring sudden impact. In tech, Amazon has tremendous power to put anyone they want out of business. AWS puts them in the enviable position of understanding all sorts of intimate details of everyone else’s business models. Again, they are too smart to do it too quickly. It pains me that my generation, a generation of people who dream of being makers and business owners, don’t see the irony of the convenience of having toilet paper delivered and lower prices at Whole Foods for what they really are - a trick and a trap that strengthens a company that can and will have a real tangible negative impact on everyone’s employment and business prospects in the future if hasn’t already.

rtpg 9y ago
I understand the dangers of monopoly, but I wish there was a stronger argument here. We've seen this sort of thing happen before, with Walmart. And none of these arguments worked! Walmart is big and dominant. It killed off smaller places, but people don't care because it has mostly everything and is cheap. "This convenient good thing is actually bad!" isn't super convincing I guess.... EDIT: the ultimate irony being that Walmart/Amazon are the "ideal endgame" of market capitalism. Razor-thin margins everywhere, people get things cheap. But how do you get cheap goods? Pressure suppliers, pay workers as little as possible. The _best case scenario_ for this economic model leads to a terrible status quo. And the only difference between this and other industries is the size of the slice of the pie the C-suite gets.
- deevolution 9y ago
  We similarly give up our privacy in exchange for convenience. Even tho we know its bad, Its just too damn convenient and easy for the majority of the population.
- refurb 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

txmx2000 9y ago

This is why this “net neutrality” nonsense is so dangerous. It’s an invented issue meant to weaken the FTC by transfering the power to regulate the internet to a government agency that doesn’t have anti-trust authority. The FTC made Amazon possible because, in the 2000s, it used anti-trust to keep local and state governments from taxing and outlawing internet sales of products. Now that Amazon is powerful, it’s lobbying to prevent the same power from being used against it. This is what net neutrality was created for. Nobody wants to slow down your Netflix.

HillaryBriss 9y ago

> Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook have remade the economy in their image. So what happens if they turn on each other? um ... aren't they supposed to turn on each other? isn't that, like, capitalism, and competition and stuff?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rglover 9y ago

Moral of the story? Become a master of logistics.

Steko 9y ago

The answer is Xi Jinping although the article doesn't mention China at all.

adventured 9y ago
Craigslist (classifieds). Google (search). eBay (auctions). Apple etc (phones). PayPal etc (payment systems). Spotify/Apple etc (music). All businesses Amazon attempted and mostly failed at. Bezos - Amazon - has been beaten quite a few times.

nadim 9y ago

Likely MZ.

panabee 9y ago

if you're in the retail supply chain, you're at risk of destruction by amazon. lower prices mean more commerce flows through amazon, which strengthens the company. bezos evidently wasn't joking when he claimed, "your margin is my opportunity." for all the valid concerns about one company consolidating too much power, amazon is also effectively saving consumers hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. the margins of retail middlemen are being eaten by amazon and essentially pocketed by consumers or invested by amazon to eventually help consumers save or enjoy more. amazon fearmongering is easy and fashionable, but all policies hurt some and help others. it would be refreshing to read an unbiased analysis of the trade-offs society faces if amazon continues to devour retail.

earlybike 9y ago

It’s not about Amazon, it’s about the tendency that most online-based consumer businesses evolve into monopolies. Mostly through network effects paired with smart M&A. So, the question is not if anyone can beat Bezos but rather beat online monopolies in general.

petey283 9y ago
This. The article is just another example of media bias toward overarching narrative.

RestlessMind 9y ago

"Your margin is my opportunity" - with that kind of attitude, Bezos is indeed a tough competitor. However, what puzzles me the most is the fact that investors are letting Amazon chug along with barely any profits. Can someone please explain to me how Bezos is able to pull off a P/E of 240 for AMZN, when the company has been around for 20+ years and no longer considered a startup (i.e. no more hyper growth phase)? For comparison, other tech titans have P/E numbers as: FB (37), GOOG (36), MSFT (27), AAPL (17). Only NFLX (216) is in the same league as AMZN.

adventured 9y ago
The particularly big leap Amazon made in its market valuation, was actually one very specific thing: AWS. That tripled its market cap from ~$150 billion to where it's at now. Specifically when they started revealing how big it was, how fast it was growing, and the operating income numbers. December 2014, the stock was at $300. Now it's $959. Nearly all of that gain is from that single thing, speculation about its future worth that is. It's not the retail business or Echo or tablets or Kindle that did it. Those are not generating huge amounts of operating income. The market is appraising (drooling about) AWS as being worth an extraordinary sum. Businesses are typically valued based on future projected earnings. For AWS that might be akin to $50-60 billion in sales and $16 billion in operating income (with a very rich multiple given our current market bubble). 20x multiple on $16b in operating income, there's $320 billion of Amazon's $460 billion. I'm not arguing AWS should be worth that, I'm saying the very inefficient market, filled full of mediocre investors and fools, is saying it is. One could argue the future operating income estimate might be high, but the market is frothing at the mouth right now, we're one or two notches (on a 10 notch scale) away from entering a euphoric insanity again given the market's (eg S&P 500) extreme PE ratio presently. Throw in Kindle, Prime, Echo, Tablets on that AWS $300 billion valuation. The traditional retail business is being valued at maybe $50 to $80 billion right now. If you look at the operating income projections for Amazon for the next few years, analysts are forecasting it's going to skyrocket, and that's solely based on AWS. Here's what's really going to happen: severe disappointment. We've witnessing peak Amazon in terms of market valuation in this general time frame (whether that's $500x billion or $700 billion, this particular market bubble represents the highest valuation Amazon will have for the next ~15 years, something equivalent to the stagnation Microsoft's stock enjoyed post dotcom bubble). Bezos becoming the world's richest briefly, is equivalent to the economic bubble peaks when someone decides to build a new world's tallest skyscraper nicely timed with the next crash.

Feniks 9y ago

Amazon came a few years too late and couldn't offer anything that sets them apart from the competition (next day delivery is pretty standard fare for any web retailer here) so yeah they were beaten. Or rather they saw the battlefield and didn't engage. THAT is what made Amazon big in the US: they were first. Nothing magical about it really. But I think my country was one of the few that already had established players. Oh there's China ofcourse, they are forerunners with ecommerce. The future belongs to Alibaba. Same with the supermarket delivery stuff, that's already been around for years. Don't understand the fuss. I have the feeling a lot of retail in the US missed to catch on to the internet. Bezos became a god partially through incompetent competition.

williamle8300 9y ago

Like... physically?

davidf18 9y ago

New York State (and some other states) are helping Amazon to replace brick and mortar stores by having unreasonable minimum wage levels. The level in NYS is $11 (I think) going to $13 and then $15. There have already been significant increases in the cost of food in grocery stores, but that is probably true of much of retail.

bootcat 9y ago

Once they said Jeff is the worst CEO alive !!, now things are getting a change !