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He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter examples of what you've said. Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and

He actually explicitly mentions Amazon and Netflix as counter examples of what you've said. Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable, they have been saved by aws Netflix - has cut the number of movies on offer dramatically, cutting out the long tail, and adopted a strategy of chasing blockbuster TV shows It's worth reading the whole article, it is pretty good. As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me.

ghaff 4y ago
Of course things are much more fractured than they used to be. The audience for Stranger Things or GoT is minuscule compared to something like "Must See TV" on NBC Thursdays in the past. I think you might be surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of Stranger Things and certainly haven't watched. It's fair that Netflix doesn't really carry long tail content--never did carry the longest tail stuff and now that content owners want more money in general and there's a lot more competition for subscribers it doesn't make sense to pay for back catalog stuff that others own. YouTube and TikTok are better examples. It seems obvious that there is a long tail. But neither Anderson or most anyone else claimed that being in the long tail was a path to riches. And while I'm not sure it's valid to write off Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc., it's probably fair to say that the long tail has mostly not been a pile of gold for the aggregators either. But it does exist.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  The long long tail of tv is now the likes of PlutoTV and Tubi etc. free streaming with channels dedicated to for example, the Beverley hillbillies !
sitkack 4y ago
> claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable If this is true, then isn't the retail side effectively removing all the oxygen from the ecosystem? This sounds massively stagnating, the combination of not-profitable and extremely efficient.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Even before Amazon a fair number of big box chains removed a lot of oxygen from the retail ecosystem. No small number of those chains themselves went out of business--yes, in part because of Amazon. (Also Walmart.) I don't really buy the "will never be profitable" part although perhaps less so than AWS.
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    If AWS is as profitable as he says there must be a huge opportunity in offering lower cost cloud infrastructure.
    - fweimer 4y ago
      I find it curious that the other two top-brand public clouds do not undercut AWS significantly in areas like network bandwidth charges, when other operators can offer similar service it vastly reduced cost. This does look like a market failure, and I don't know why we are in this situation. Maybe the top brands are just very, very strong?
      - scott00 4y ago
        Big customers don't pay list prices, they get negotiated rates. To the extent Azure and GCE are interested in competing on price, it's the big customers they're after. All cutting list prices would get them is a bunch of price sensitive small fish, and that's not where the money is.
      - rurp 4y ago
        I think we're finding that tech oligopolies don't lend themselves to healthy markets. The barrier to entry to becoming a full service public cloud is massive. The established players know that there is little chance of an upstart coming out of nowhere to eat their lunch, so they compete (or don't) appropriately. Getting cutthroat on pricing would only hurt everyone's bottom line. Smart phone apps are the same story. Android and IOS developers have to deal with draconian rules and exorbitant fees. In a healthier market other companies would swoop in and improve on those huge fees and arbitrary moderation, but creating a new smartphone platform is ridiculously difficult, which means that the two established players can basically do what they want within the law.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable Far, far from reality. Amazon retail can be very profitable - the amount of data, arbitrage, and scale is just unmatched by any other company.
- mcswell 4y ago
  My guess--and I admit that it is just a guess--is that Amazon retail is only profitable if you have something unusual that you're selling, and the unusual aspect of it can be described by your potential buyers in words. As an example of something that can be described by words, I had a brass sextant on my wish-list (don't ask why), and a relative bought it for me recently; it was easy to find, didn't have to search through pages of hits, and was from what I suspect is a very small seller. Otoh, I wanted to buy some sandals like the ones I had back in the <date omitted to hide old fogy's true age>. It appears there are 167 pages of hits for men's leather sandals, not enough ways to narrow the focus--and not all the hits are even sandals (some are ordinary shoes). Oddly, before I specified a size, it said there were 7 pages; when I told it my size, it jumped to 167 pages. (Go figure.) Worst, most are name brands; I can select name brands, but I can't say "anything but name brands." And while I said "men's" sandals in my search, women's sandals (labeled as such) are showing up. In sum, Amazon does not make it easy to find small retailers' products, unless they're really niche products. (Books are different, because titles and authors are pretty unique.)
mcv 4y ago
Yeah, but wasn't Squid Game Netflix's last blockbuster? That's certainly not your standard Hollywood-style blockbuster. So that means it does offer a way for weird niche stuff to get really big.
- moate 4y ago
  IDK that you can say Squid Games isn't part of a trend when Korean pop culture and arts are having a pretty big moment around the world (K-pop is massive, Parasite kicked ass at the Oscars) and EVERYONE wants a dystopia story because of how the shitty the world feels. Squid Game doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere, and is actually pretty derivative (go re-watch Running Man or Battle Royale).
encoderer 4y ago
I think you underestimate the scale of how “short tailed” everything used to be. Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are popular. In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked about it for 10+ years.
- kristianc 4y ago
  Not only that, but the long tail has been much much more representative than the days of the short tail ever was. Everyone knew that there was a huge audience for hip hop, but we’ve only seen how huge that audience was since it came to dominate streaming charts.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  I thought it was great when Klinger got married. This nightmare of Hawkeye's is something I'll never forget. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk
- fourthark 4y ago
  Mid tail
- sien 4y ago
  According to Chuck Klosterman in his book on 'The Nineties' more people watched an average episode of Seinfeld than watch the finale of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. About the only thing that remains for mass audiences is sport. Even there on demand replays of sports are changing things. Also don't best selling records or streams or whatever actually indicate far less revenue and a far smaller share of what people are listening to than they used to ?
Izkata 4y ago
> As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me. It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry Potter (before the movies), etc.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  That's more of a childrens/YA literature thing. It tends to be much more short-tailed than adult fiction. Although adult nonfiction is also extremely short-tailed, probably even more than YA.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Those specific ones perhaps, but I worked in a library for a year and there is so much variety in every section that I think it's much more long-tailed/"fractured" than the media everyone else is talking about. That was my point: Even when stuff is fractured, there are standouts that manage to become hits, and it even happened without the reach of the internet. My examples were some of them from that era.
smsm42 4y ago
Neflix is not really a good example as they are bounded to what copyright owners are charging, and they can't really pick and choose things that they did not produce outside of what's not owned by Big Content copyright holders. At the early days, I imagine, one could get a license to stream a lot of things for relatively cheap, since nobody knew if there's any money in it at all, so no risk to let some weirdos to play with it. Now everybody knows large content catalog costs serious money, so Netflix can't just license it for cheap anymore. Using it as a proof that the "long tail" has no value is exactly the opposite of what is happening, I think. > everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan Of course they do, did you see the long tail picture? Did you notice the peak on the left side? That's Obi-Wan. It's expected to be there. Its existence does not disprove the right side of the picture. Have some patience and listen until they stop talking about Obi-Wan - then the interesting part starts.
xwolfi 4y ago
All this is also very american. Other languages/culture are variate as well and mixing your local culture with some anglo-american influence is super interesting too. None of my ancestors spoke English, thanks to the internet I'm the first one. It really doesn't feel like stagnation, if people knew what people thought outside of French, their mind would be blown. The contrary is true too (but somehow we fail to attract, probably because English is the short tail, French the long tail) !

ghaff 4y ago

Of course things are much more fractured than they used to be. The audience for Stranger Things or GoT is minuscule compared to something like "Must See TV" on NBC Thursdays in the past. I think you might be surprised at the number of people who haven't heard of Stranger Things and certainly haven't watched. It's fair that Netflix doesn't really carry long tail content--never did carry the longest tail stuff and now that content owners want more money in general and there's a lot more competition for subscribers it doesn't make sense to pay for back catalog stuff that others own. YouTube and TikTok are better examples. It seems obvious that there is a long tail. But neither Anderson or most anyone else claimed that being in the long tail was a path to riches. And while I'm not sure it's valid to write off Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, etc., it's probably fair to say that the long tail has mostly not been a pile of gold for the aggregators either. But it does exist.

jamiek88 4y ago
The long long tail of tv is now the likes of PlutoTV and Tubi etc. free streaming with channels dedicated to for example, the Beverley hillbillies !

sitkack 4y ago

> claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable If this is true, then isn't the retail side effectively removing all the oxygen from the ecosystem? This sounds massively stagnating, the combination of not-profitable and extremely efficient.

ghaff 4y ago
Even before Amazon a fair number of big box chains removed a lot of oxygen from the retail ecosystem. No small number of those chains themselves went out of business--yes, in part because of Amazon. (Also Walmart.) I don't really buy the "will never be profitable" part although perhaps less so than AWS.
- tgflynn 4y ago
  If AWS is as profitable as he says there must be a huge opportunity in offering lower cost cloud infrastructure.
  - fweimer 4y ago
    I find it curious that the other two top-brand public clouds do not undercut AWS significantly in areas like network bandwidth charges, when other operators can offer similar service it vastly reduced cost. This does look like a market failure, and I don't know why we are in this situation. Maybe the top brands are just very, very strong?
    - scott00 4y ago
      Big customers don't pay list prices, they get negotiated rates. To the extent Azure and GCE are interested in competing on price, it's the big customers they're after. All cutting list prices would get them is a bunch of price sensitive small fish, and that's not where the money is.
    - rurp 4y ago
      I think we're finding that tech oligopolies don't lend themselves to healthy markets. The barrier to entry to becoming a full service public cloud is massive. The established players know that there is little chance of an upstart coming out of nowhere to eat their lunch, so they compete (or don't) appropriately. Getting cutthroat on pricing would only hurt everyone's bottom line. Smart phone apps are the same story. Android and IOS developers have to deal with draconian rules and exorbitant fees. In a healthier market other companies would swoop in and improve on those huge fees and arbitrary moderation, but creating a new smartphone platform is ridiculously difficult, which means that the two established players can basically do what they want within the law.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

> Amazon - he says a lot of pundits claim their retail arm is not and will never be profitable Far, far from reality. Amazon retail can be very profitable - the amount of data, arbitrage, and scale is just unmatched by any other company.

mcswell 4y ago
My guess--and I admit that it is just a guess--is that Amazon retail is only profitable if you have something unusual that you're selling, and the unusual aspect of it can be described by your potential buyers in words. As an example of something that can be described by words, I had a brass sextant on my wish-list (don't ask why), and a relative bought it for me recently; it was easy to find, didn't have to search through pages of hits, and was from what I suspect is a very small seller. Otoh, I wanted to buy some sandals like the ones I had back in the <date omitted to hide old fogy's true age>. It appears there are 167 pages of hits for men's leather sandals, not enough ways to narrow the focus--and not all the hits are even sandals (some are ordinary shoes). Oddly, before I specified a size, it said there were 7 pages; when I told it my size, it jumped to 167 pages. (Go figure.) Worst, most are name brands; I can select name brands, but I can't say "anything but name brands." And while I said "men's" sandals in my search, women's sandals (labeled as such) are showing up. In sum, Amazon does not make it easy to find small retailers' products, unless they're really niche products. (Books are different, because titles and authors are pretty unique.)

mcv 4y ago

Yeah, but wasn't Squid Game Netflix's last blockbuster? That's certainly not your standard Hollywood-style blockbuster. So that means it does offer a way for weird niche stuff to get really big.

moate 4y ago
IDK that you can say Squid Games isn't part of a trend when Korean pop culture and arts are having a pretty big moment around the world (K-pop is massive, Parasite kicked ass at the Oscars) and EVERYONE wants a dystopia story because of how the shitty the world feels. Squid Game doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere, and is actually pretty derivative (go re-watch Running Man or Battle Royale).

encoderer 4y ago

I think you underestimate the scale of how “short tailed” everything used to be. Yes yes tiger king, stranger things, etc. these things are popular. In 1983 over 50% of the entire United States watched the last episode of MASH live as it aired on NBC. And people talked about it for 10+ years.

kristianc 4y ago
Not only that, but the long tail has been much much more representative than the days of the short tail ever was. Everyone knew that there was a huge audience for hip hop, but we’ve only seen how huge that audience was since it came to dominate streaming charts.
mikewarot 4y ago
I thought it was great when Klinger got married. This nightmare of Hawkeye's is something I'll never forget. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO3_iRh2Ryk
fourthark 4y ago
Mid tail
sien 4y ago
According to Chuck Klosterman in his book on 'The Nineties' more people watched an average episode of Seinfeld than watch the finale of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. About the only thing that remains for mass audiences is sport. Even there on demand replays of sports are changing things. Also don't best selling records or streams or whatever actually indicate far less revenue and a far smaller share of what people are listening to than they used to ?

Izkata 4y ago

> As for a 'fracturing',everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan. Kate Bush is top of the charts because of stranger things. Remember everyone talking about Tiger King or GoT? Certainly doesn't feel fractured to me. It's also losing sight of books. There's so, so many books out there, it could be called even more fractured than modern TV/streaming, and yet big hits happened. When I was in school in the late 90s/early 2000s, everyone at least knew of (if not was a fan of) Animorphs, Goosebumps, Redwall, Harry Potter (before the movies), etc.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago
That's more of a childrens/YA literature thing. It tends to be much more short-tailed than adult fiction. Although adult nonfiction is also extremely short-tailed, probably even more than YA.
- Izkata 4y ago
  Those specific ones perhaps, but I worked in a library for a year and there is so much variety in every section that I think it's much more long-tailed/"fractured" than the media everyone else is talking about. That was my point: Even when stuff is fractured, there are standouts that manage to become hits, and it even happened without the reach of the internet. My examples were some of them from that era.

smsm42 4y ago

Neflix is not really a good example as they are bounded to what copyright owners are charging, and they can't really pick and choose things that they did not produce outside of what's not owned by Big Content copyright holders. At the early days, I imagine, one could get a license to stream a lot of things for relatively cheap, since nobody knew if there's any money in it at all, so no risk to let some weirdos to play with it. Now everybody knows large content catalog costs serious money, so Netflix can't just license it for cheap anymore. Using it as a proof that the "long tail" has no value is exactly the opposite of what is happening, I think. > everyone's talking about stranger things and obi-wan Of course they do, did you see the long tail picture? Did you notice the peak on the left side? That's Obi-Wan. It's expected to be there. Its existence does not disprove the right side of the picture. Have some patience and listen until they stop talking about Obi-Wan - then the interesting part starts.

xwolfi 4y ago

All this is also very american. Other languages/culture are variate as well and mixing your local culture with some anglo-american influence is super interesting too. None of my ancestors spoke English, thanks to the internet I'm the first one. It really doesn't feel like stagnation, if people knew what people thought outside of French, their mind would be blown. The contrary is true too (but somehow we fail to attract, probably because English is the short tail, French the long tail) !