5 ms·

It’s also probably very common that people give up and Amazon loses the sale.

onion2k 5y ago
I suspect it isn't, especially for books. If someone goes to the lengths of looking for a specific book on Amazon I imagine they'll end up buying it there 9 times out of 10 at least. The amount of effort necessary to trawl through the search results for a few minutes is always going to be much less than the effort it takes to go to a different website, or to a retail store.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  There's usually some lead time between becoming an annoying nightmare and another service getting traction and then before the avalanche hits. But when it hits nobody should believe it when someone said "it all happened so fast". Because this is a long time coming for both Google and Amazon. Which will prove that with enough effort even the mountains of goodwill that Google and Amazon has kept piling up for it's first decades can be burnt through with effective (ab)use of bigdata, ai and "UX".
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Which will prove that with enough effort even the mountains of goodwill that Google and Amazon has kept piling up for it's first decades can be burnt through with effective (ab)use of bigdata, ai and "UX". Amazon and Google have replaced mountains of goodwill with mountains of cold, hard cash that they can use to either buy the competition or pay engineers a lot to build just-about-good-enough versions of things that will keep people from leaving to go to the competition. Either way, competing with Amazon or Google in their main profit centers (retail and cloud in the case of Amazon, or ads and search in the case of Google) is virtually impossible unless you're an already exceptionally big company like Microsoft. I don't believe any company that doesn't already exist will ever compete at scale with Amazon or Google. Competition in those areas is essentially finished. I would love to be proved wrong though.
    - mmcdermott 5y ago
      Straight up competition - a marketing company built on search or ecommerce for everything - probably wouldn't. The company that takes them down will come from a side angle and might not even be recognized as a competitor. Amazon itself is an example of this. It wasn't too terribly long ago that Walmart ruled retail and Amazon was a niche little company selling books (online!). Whatever takes down Google and Amazon will be something similar.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > I don't believe any company that doesn't already exist will ever compete at scale with Amazon or Google. People said the exact same thing, with the same conviction, about IBM, Microsoft, Walmart, etc.
bluesign 5y ago
it means it is better for Amazon to lose some sales to promote something else.

I suspect it isn't, especially for books. If someone goes to the lengths of looking for a specific book on Amazon I imagine they'll end up buying it there 9 times out of 10 at least. The amount of effort necessary to trawl through the search results for a few minutes is always going to be much less than the effort it takes to go to a different website, or to a retail store.

skinkestek 5y ago
There's usually some lead time between becoming an annoying nightmare and another service getting traction and then before the avalanche hits. But when it hits nobody should believe it when someone said "it all happened so fast". Because this is a long time coming for both Google and Amazon. Which will prove that with enough effort even the mountains of goodwill that Google and Amazon has kept piling up for it's first decades can be burnt through with effective (ab)use of bigdata, ai and "UX".
- onion2k 5y ago
  Which will prove that with enough effort even the mountains of goodwill that Google and Amazon has kept piling up for it's first decades can be burnt through with effective (ab)use of bigdata, ai and "UX". Amazon and Google have replaced mountains of goodwill with mountains of cold, hard cash that they can use to either buy the competition or pay engineers a lot to build just-about-good-enough versions of things that will keep people from leaving to go to the competition. Either way, competing with Amazon or Google in their main profit centers (retail and cloud in the case of Amazon, or ads and search in the case of Google) is virtually impossible unless you're an already exceptionally big company like Microsoft. I don't believe any company that doesn't already exist will ever compete at scale with Amazon or Google. Competition in those areas is essentially finished. I would love to be proved wrong though.
  - mmcdermott 5y ago
    Straight up competition - a marketing company built on search or ecommerce for everything - probably wouldn't. The company that takes them down will come from a side angle and might not even be recognized as a competitor. Amazon itself is an example of this. It wasn't too terribly long ago that Walmart ruled retail and Amazon was a niche little company selling books (online!). Whatever takes down Google and Amazon will be something similar.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > I don't believe any company that doesn't already exist will ever compete at scale with Amazon or Google. People said the exact same thing, with the same conviction, about IBM, Microsoft, Walmart, etc.

bluesign 5y ago

it means it is better for Amazon to lose some sales to promote something else.