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What about Amazon makes it successful with having multiple versions of the same concept at one time compared to Google's* lack of success doing the same? *At l

What about Amazon makes it successful with having multiple versions of the same concept at one time compared to Google's* lack of success doing the same? *At least my impression of Google and their structure/incentive system that pushes different groups to pursue the same thing and not succeed at any. Messaging is at the forefront in my mind.

nickpsecurity 8y ago
It's their strong customer and product focus. I answered in more detail in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19286649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19286649
k_sh 8y ago
Follow-through. Google is infamous for this sequence of events, time and time again: 1. We made this great new thing that's gonna change the way you verb! Hope you enjoy it! 2. (1-5 years of product stagnation) 3. Hey, thanks for the all the good times. We're closing the thing at the end of the year. Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  > Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs. Except when it comes to selling counterfeit merchandise. This is more than just a nitpick, they are cannibalizing their core business. What I don't know, and I assume they do know, is how bad is the problem. Is it impacting 1% of customers who ultimately leave their platform (which could easily be offset by other factors), or are we at the tip of the iceberg and they're going to continually lose marketshare with time?
  - stone-monkey 8y ago
    Obviously they must know it's a problem, but it seems to be a constant arms race fighting with the counterfeiters, especially with their current business model. It seems pretty clear Amazon is moving away from being a direct retailer of items and instead fulfilling orders for other stores. Moreover, they're leaving it in the hands of these storefronts to differentiate themselves by having them pay extra to separate their stock from other warehouse goods. Lastly, it seems as if the end goal is for the retail store to become a platform for a new wave of direct to consumer manufacturers, which you see in the form of Anker, that trending Orolay jacket, etc.
    - sutterbomb 8y ago
      Their in house brands are a large and growing part of the marketplace, so it's not quite right to claim they're moving away from being a direct retailer. Perhaps "retailer of other brands" is where they're moving away from but even that I'm not positive there's been any meaningful change of late.
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        Even their house brands are sometimes outsourced - its been reported here that counterfeits occur even among them.
  - 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
    There’s been a lot of heated discussion about this on HN previously, but it would be interesting to know 1) how big of a problem it is, and 2) what people are buying that seem to have this problem. My household buys on average 10-20 items from amazon each week for many years (combined personal, my business, my wife’s business) and have yet to receive a counterfeit item. Am I doing something different?
    - cloakandswagger 8y ago
      The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else. Occasionally I'll see a broken-English listing from a third-party seller advertising a $800 camera for $200, but when that happens I just...don't purchase the obvious counterfeit product.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        I suspect there’s something to what you say. People buying on price are more likely to hit counterfeits. It’s also statistics. With a large enough population, some people are going to get unlucky purely by chance.
      - whack 8y ago
        But how else can I be a disruptive hacker if I don't buy $800 cameras for $200?
      - MagicPropmaker 8y ago
        I've gotten counterfeit Brita water filters and counterfeit SanDisk USB drives. And, no, I wasn't trying to find a "bargain". See this article in the Atlantic about the problem -- it's not just a bunch of crazy HN zealots: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazon-may-have-a-counterfeit-problem/558482/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazo... @dang -- can you ban this user for his unhelpful comments that mock real people with real problems?
      - 8y ago
  - neilv 8y ago
    I've been wondering for a while why Amazon has been letting (my impression of) trust in the listings on its retail site be eroded so much. My best naive wild guess (as a techie, not an MBA) is that a solution is Amazon private brands. Amazon could exercise control over the supply chain, could keep other sellers from piggybacking on a listing, could keep the reviews generally positive (in various ways, including aggressive investigation of suspected fake negative reviews), and could even have customer service treat private brands more favorably than many others. Plus preferential listing and smarter targeting. Meanwhile, most other brands would still have to be on Amazon, but suffer the current awful environment of counterfeits, reuse of listings for different products, fake reviews on their and competitor's listings, etc.
    - tkxxx7 8y ago
      This is basically already happening. There is a long list of Amazon-owned brands - not just AmazonBasics anymore
      - neilv 8y ago
        The wild speculation part is that a plan for building trust in Amazon-owned brands could explain an appearance of foot-dragging in fixing trust problems hurting other brands.
  - banku_brougham 8y ago
    They measure counterfeit complaint rates with a PPM metric.
  - bitpow 8y ago
    They just launched project zero, so at least they seem to be addressing the issue. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zero https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zer...
    - illumin8 8y ago
      Seems really cool. Serialization is the answer: manufacturer sends exact serial numbers electronically before shipping merchandise. Serial numbers are scanned with barcode readers on entry to fulfillment center and as they are picked/packed for delivery. There should be zero chance of co-mingling if done properly.
      - binarysolo 8y ago
        Amazon does do this - it's called Amazon Transparency. https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency
        hobofan 8y ago
        Given the incredible disregard for correct usage of GTINs by Amazon on Amazon.com I've seen in the past, I'm very surprised that this exists.
    - azinman2 8y ago
      “We’ve been testing these automated protections with a number of brands, and on average, our automated protections proactively stop 100 times more suspected counterfeit products as compared to what we reactively remove based on reports from brands.” What’s scary is the implicit quantity of counterfit products quoted here.
    - callalex 8y ago
      Wow that is an extremely unfortunate name, it almost seems like they’re maliciously trying to ride the positive and successful associations of the existing Project Zero.
  - tanilama 8y ago
    I don't encounter many counterfeit problem as people here seem to be frequently hit. I use Amazon quite frequently, more than one order each week. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon employee.
    - saalweachter 8y ago
      The line in the sand for me was when I purchased new socks and, fresh from the sealed plastic wrapper, they just didn't have that glorious new-sock feel. Washings later I can still tell the difference between the counterfeits I got online and the real ones I got in a store, and it is always a little let down when they come up in the sock rotation.
      - mypalmike 8y ago
        I've bought the same Hanes underwear from different stores at different times and gotten very different sizes and material quality. Sometimes what seems like a counterfeit could be just manufacturer material/parts sourcing and factory variation.
  - CodeWriter23 8y ago
    > Except when it comes to selling counterfeit merchandise. Bought Gold Toes on Amazon. Squeezed my feet causing numbness. My wife reported the same with her much smaller feet. Manufacturing defects too. Nice, higher end semi-gloss cards and packaging, looked legit. Sold in packs of 6 pairs. Bought Gold Toes at Macy's. Comfortable fit, no numbness. No manufacturing defects. Not letting my wife touch them. Sold in packs of 8 pairs. BTW $3 per-pair price actually less than Amazon even though not on sale at Macy's.
- Teknoman117 8y ago
  I'm going to miss Inbox. Sure they merged a bunch of features back into Gmail, but they still don't provide some of the greatest ones - such as context aware grouping. Planning a trip? All the emails from the various services you reserved (airfare, rental car, hotel, etc.) get grouped under "Your Trip to X" automatically. Or the grouping of GitHub emails under a group per repository or organization with buttons such as "view pull request" or "view issue."
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    Or that their desktop web experience was the same as mobile experience.
tracker1 8y ago
I think it comes down to how they handle success at a smaller scale and tend to prioritize for their higher value experiments. I think the better example, on the other side of Google would be Apple, where almost all priority is in the Phone first, Tablet second, everything else after. For google, you have one line of business than generates billions in revenue and another that generates a few million in profit, in the larger company, it's not likely to gain traction, where in another company it might be larger than the rest of the company.
- asaph 8y ago
  > I think the better example ... would be Apple, where almost all priority is in the Phone first, Tablet second, everything else after. To be fair, the iPhone has been an earth shattering success that created multiple brand new markets (e.g. App store, Apple Pay) and propelled Apple to become the first trillion dollar company in history and the most valuable brand in the world. It's difficult to convincingly make the case not to prioritize a product line like that above others.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    They have enough funding they could easily have spun of both MacOS and the Macintosh hardware into separate sub-companies or reorganized the organization structure a number of ways not to let things stagnate for over half a decade. MacOS and even the hardware largely feel like how IE6 was for the longest time.
dalbasal 8y ago
That's an interesting question, imo. Google is (was?) also very well known for (A) making decisions with data and (B) letting flowers bloom, fail, and moving on. You could describe both with the same shorthand cliches, but they're obviously very different. I think the difference is how intentional they are. In this case, they want to do physical retail. They have certain ideas about what meaningful wins they can achieve in retail. What they're "testing" are, in a very broad sense, implimentation details and approaches. They are intent ona destination, but very expiremental about the route. Google is/was either more "blue sky." They "expirement" more like a VC or incubator expirements. It's more about making likely betys than finding a way to do X. Anything that seems promising is worth a go. They have certain areas (ML, web/mobile platorms) that they invest particularly heavily in, similar to a VC's specific health-tech or ed-tech funds, but the destination is blue sky... "change the world and make billions with ML." I would say amazon does it more like a startup, and Google is more like a startup investor. BTW, sometimes one works and sometimes the other works. Google (mostly via android) had far more success in mobile devices/OSs, even though both attempted it. I think you have to give the edge to amazon though. They managed to build a new business that was better than the old one. Google still makes all its money fom search+ads and supporting stuff. Even their big product successes (android, chrome, drive/docs, maps, etc.) are not money spinners. They arguably support the search+ads business, but nothing is in the same league as aws.
Udik 8y ago
What surprises me about the Google attitude is that it seems to go against one of the basic rules of entrepreneurship: that it's the execution that counts, not the idea. In other words Google seems to throw multiple ideas hoping for some to be successful, but doesn't really seem to put an effort to push them forward despite the initial difficulties. It's a fundamentally insecure attitude: they hope to be blown by the success of something rather than working hard to make it succeed.

nickpsecurity 8y ago

It's their strong customer and product focus. I answered in more detail in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19286649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19286649

k_sh 8y ago

Follow-through. Google is infamous for this sequence of events, time and time again: 1. We made this great new thing that's gonna change the way you verb! Hope you enjoy it! 2. (1-5 years of product stagnation) 3. Hey, thanks for the all the good times. We're closing the thing at the end of the year. Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs.

Judgmentality 8y ago
> Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs. Except when it comes to selling counterfeit merchandise. This is more than just a nitpick, they are cannibalizing their core business. What I don't know, and I assume they do know, is how bad is the problem. Is it impacting 1% of customers who ultimately leave their platform (which could easily be offset by other factors), or are we at the tip of the iceberg and they're going to continually lose marketshare with time?
- stone-monkey 8y ago
  Obviously they must know it's a problem, but it seems to be a constant arms race fighting with the counterfeiters, especially with their current business model. It seems pretty clear Amazon is moving away from being a direct retailer of items and instead fulfilling orders for other stores. Moreover, they're leaving it in the hands of these storefronts to differentiate themselves by having them pay extra to separate their stock from other warehouse goods. Lastly, it seems as if the end goal is for the retail store to become a platform for a new wave of direct to consumer manufacturers, which you see in the form of Anker, that trending Orolay jacket, etc.
  - sutterbomb 8y ago
    Their in house brands are a large and growing part of the marketplace, so it's not quite right to claim they're moving away from being a direct retailer. Perhaps "retailer of other brands" is where they're moving away from but even that I'm not positive there's been any meaningful change of late.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Even their house brands are sometimes outsourced - its been reported here that counterfeits occur even among them.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 8y ago
  There’s been a lot of heated discussion about this on HN previously, but it would be interesting to know 1) how big of a problem it is, and 2) what people are buying that seem to have this problem. My household buys on average 10-20 items from amazon each week for many years (combined personal, my business, my wife’s business) and have yet to receive a counterfeit item. Am I doing something different?
  - cloakandswagger 8y ago
    The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else. Occasionally I'll see a broken-English listing from a third-party seller advertising a $800 camera for $200, but when that happens I just...don't purchase the obvious counterfeit product.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I suspect there’s something to what you say. People buying on price are more likely to hit counterfeits. It’s also statistics. With a large enough population, some people are going to get unlucky purely by chance.
    - whack 8y ago
      But how else can I be a disruptive hacker if I don't buy $800 cameras for $200?
    - MagicPropmaker 8y ago
      I've gotten counterfeit Brita water filters and counterfeit SanDisk USB drives. And, no, I wasn't trying to find a "bargain". See this article in the Atlantic about the problem -- it's not just a bunch of crazy HN zealots: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazon-may-have-a-counterfeit-problem/558482/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazo... @dang -- can you ban this user for his unhelpful comments that mock real people with real problems?
    - 8y ago
- neilv 8y ago
  I've been wondering for a while why Amazon has been letting (my impression of) trust in the listings on its retail site be eroded so much. My best naive wild guess (as a techie, not an MBA) is that a solution is Amazon private brands. Amazon could exercise control over the supply chain, could keep other sellers from piggybacking on a listing, could keep the reviews generally positive (in various ways, including aggressive investigation of suspected fake negative reviews), and could even have customer service treat private brands more favorably than many others. Plus preferential listing and smarter targeting. Meanwhile, most other brands would still have to be on Amazon, but suffer the current awful environment of counterfeits, reuse of listings for different products, fake reviews on their and competitor's listings, etc.
  - tkxxx7 8y ago
    This is basically already happening. There is a long list of Amazon-owned brands - not just AmazonBasics anymore
    - neilv 8y ago
      The wild speculation part is that a plan for building trust in Amazon-owned brands could explain an appearance of foot-dragging in fixing trust problems hurting other brands.
- banku_brougham 8y ago
  They measure counterfeit complaint rates with a PPM metric.
- bitpow 8y ago
  They just launched project zero, so at least they seem to be addressing the issue. https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zero https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/amazon-project-zer...
  - illumin8 8y ago
    Seems really cool. Serialization is the answer: manufacturer sends exact serial numbers electronically before shipping merchandise. Serial numbers are scanned with barcode readers on entry to fulfillment center and as they are picked/packed for delivery. There should be zero chance of co-mingling if done properly.
    - binarysolo 8y ago
      Amazon does do this - it's called Amazon Transparency. https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency
      - hobofan 8y ago
        Given the incredible disregard for correct usage of GTINs by Amazon on Amazon.com I've seen in the past, I'm very surprised that this exists.
  - azinman2 8y ago
    “We’ve been testing these automated protections with a number of brands, and on average, our automated protections proactively stop 100 times more suspected counterfeit products as compared to what we reactively remove based on reports from brands.” What’s scary is the implicit quantity of counterfit products quoted here.
  - callalex 8y ago
    Wow that is an extremely unfortunate name, it almost seems like they’re maliciously trying to ride the positive and successful associations of the existing Project Zero.
- tanilama 8y ago
  I don't encounter many counterfeit problem as people here seem to be frequently hit. I use Amazon quite frequently, more than one order each week. Disclaimer: Ex-Amazon employee.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    The line in the sand for me was when I purchased new socks and, fresh from the sealed plastic wrapper, they just didn't have that glorious new-sock feel. Washings later I can still tell the difference between the counterfeits I got online and the real ones I got in a store, and it is always a little let down when they come up in the sock rotation.
    - mypalmike 8y ago
      I've bought the same Hanes underwear from different stores at different times and gotten very different sizes and material quality. Sometimes what seems like a counterfeit could be just manufacturer material/parts sourcing and factory variation.
- CodeWriter23 8y ago
  > Except when it comes to selling counterfeit merchandise. Bought Gold Toes on Amazon. Squeezed my feet causing numbness. My wife reported the same with her much smaller feet. Manufacturing defects too. Nice, higher end semi-gloss cards and packaging, looked legit. Sold in packs of 6 pairs. Bought Gold Toes at Macy's. Comfortable fit, no numbness. No manufacturing defects. Not letting my wife touch them. Sold in packs of 8 pairs. BTW $3 per-pair price actually less than Amazon even though not on sale at Macy's.
Teknoman117 8y ago
I'm going to miss Inbox. Sure they merged a bunch of features back into Gmail, but they still don't provide some of the greatest ones - such as context aware grouping. Planning a trip? All the emails from the various services you reserved (airfare, rental car, hotel, etc.) get grouped under "Your Trip to X" automatically. Or the grouping of GitHub emails under a group per repository or organization with buttons such as "view pull request" or "view issue."
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Or that their desktop web experience was the same as mobile experience.

tracker1 8y ago

I think it comes down to how they handle success at a smaller scale and tend to prioritize for their higher value experiments. I think the better example, on the other side of Google would be Apple, where almost all priority is in the Phone first, Tablet second, everything else after. For google, you have one line of business than generates billions in revenue and another that generates a few million in profit, in the larger company, it's not likely to gain traction, where in another company it might be larger than the rest of the company.

asaph 8y ago
> I think the better example ... would be Apple, where almost all priority is in the Phone first, Tablet second, everything else after. To be fair, the iPhone has been an earth shattering success that created multiple brand new markets (e.g. App store, Apple Pay) and propelled Apple to become the first trillion dollar company in history and the most valuable brand in the world. It's difficult to convincingly make the case not to prioritize a product line like that above others.
- tracker1 8y ago
  They have enough funding they could easily have spun of both MacOS and the Macintosh hardware into separate sub-companies or reorganized the organization structure a number of ways not to let things stagnate for over half a decade. MacOS and even the hardware largely feel like how IE6 was for the longest time.

dalbasal 8y ago

That's an interesting question, imo. Google is (was?) also very well known for (A) making decisions with data and (B) letting flowers bloom, fail, and moving on. You could describe both with the same shorthand cliches, but they're obviously very different. I think the difference is how intentional they are. In this case, they want to do physical retail. They have certain ideas about what meaningful wins they can achieve in retail. What they're "testing" are, in a very broad sense, implimentation details and approaches. They are intent ona destination, but very expiremental about the route. Google is/was either more "blue sky." They "expirement" more like a VC or incubator expirements. It's more about making likely betys than finding a way to do X. Anything that seems promising is worth a go. They have certain areas (ML, web/mobile platorms) that they invest particularly heavily in, similar to a VC's specific health-tech or ed-tech funds, but the destination is blue sky... "change the world and make billions with ML." I would say amazon does it more like a startup, and Google is more like a startup investor. BTW, sometimes one works and sometimes the other works. Google (mostly via android) had far more success in mobile devices/OSs, even though both attempted it. I think you have to give the edge to amazon though. They managed to build a new business that was better than the old one. Google still makes all its money fom search+ads and supporting stuff. Even their big product successes (android, chrome, drive/docs, maps, etc.) are not money spinners. They arguably support the search+ads business, but nothing is in the same league as aws.

Udik 8y ago

What surprises me about the Google attitude is that it seems to go against one of the basic rules of entrepreneurship: that it's the execution that counts, not the idea. In other words Google seems to throw multiple ideas hoping for some to be successful, but doesn't really seem to put an effort to push them forward despite the initial difficulties. It's a fundamentally insecure attitude: they hope to be blown by the success of something rather than working hard to make it succeed.