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It always seemed like an obvious area of expansion for Amazon. Some sort of included email account that could be combined with your Amazon prime membership. L

It always seemed like an obvious area of expansion for Amazon. Some sort of included email account that could be combined with your Amazon prime membership. Like every prime member gets 5 family members. Email is still pretty sticky. On the enterprise side they are already talking to a significant chunk of the total market for office productivity users. Instead they went and started a movie studio, were in talks to acquire physical movie theaters and acquired a retail medical group (OneMedical). Its a shame they didn't take it as seriously (i.e. smart acquisitions) when the number of players that could scale up such offerings is much smaller than the number of players that can make movies.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fbdab103 3y ago
I really like this idea. I would totally pay Amazon for email, and would not have many reservations recommending it to tech illiterate. If you are going to get in bed with BigTech, Amazon feels the least bad to me (but they are all horrible for different reasons).
- thih9 3y ago
  Why does Amazon feel the least bad to you? Is there some deeper reason?
  - stakhanov 3y ago
    Well, if the current choice is between Gmail and Outlook, it seems like bad mojo that all the operators of e-mail are also operators of advertising networks; they are the "attention brokers" of the world. Amazon has people pay them for infrastructure and has no line of busines that seems like a conflict of interests. (Online retailing doesn't seem like one, for example).
    - abadpoli 3y ago
      Advertising is one of Amazon’s largest and most profitable business units, fwiw. https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-the-most-powerful-advertising-machine-in-the-world-135753395.html https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-bui...
      - stakhanov 3y ago
        It's hard for me to relate this accounting category that the article is talking about to actual Amazon products. I mean, of course you can rebrand the "marketplace" concept as "advertising", but which of Amazon's products would I be using, if I just have a link that I want people to click on, and I assume that my target audience is not already on the amazon retail website? -- It sort of depends on what you define as "advertising", but to me it means shoving stuff in my face that I didn't want shoved in my face. If I go to "amazon.com", I'm voluntarily saying "sell me stuff, I actually need to buy something right now".
        therealpygon 3y ago
        You seem to be confusing Amazon (the company), with only Amazon (the online retail website). The Amazon Company has a number of advertising vehicles outside of just their retail website. There is also a significant amount of advertising within their retail website as well. Have you not noticed all of the “sponsored” listings and other types of ads for (often inferior) products to show up under your search terms? Beyond that, “ad revenue” is often the vehicle for accounting data brokering due to the significant amount of tracking they do across all their various sites. There is also direct video ad revenue that comes from Twitch, is planned for Amazon Prime, so on and so forth. There is no pick-and-choose in the way advertising would be defined, like you suggest. Advertising is just that; content that has either been paid for another party to show, has received payment to show, or the analytics/tracking data used to influence buyers or is marketed to sellers and other companies. By your definition, google’s ads in search results and targeted in websites wouldn’t be advertising either, because you [paraphrasing] “asked for it”.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    At least Amazon has support. Good luck if something happens to your Gmail account.
mike_d 3y ago
In your mind what would have been a smart acquisition? Why do you think the number of players who could "scale" is so small? Up until the O365 apocalypse, there were tons of people operating 100k to 1m user email systems on a few servers with a single digit number of staff (i.e. every university and most big non-tech companies). As you mention email is super sticky. I can't fathom an argument where OneMedical didn't get them more room for innovation than buying/building a solution to a problem that was solved in 2004.
- veqq 3y ago
  What was the O365 apocalypse?
  - coryrc 3y ago
    Follow this back a few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1230573/microsoft-on-premise-vs-cloud-exchange-mailboxes/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1230573/microsoft-on-pre... (Sorry I don't have a more-thorough link, though just those three years tell the story themselves)
    - TMWNN 3y ago
      I would have asked mike_d about the "O365 apocalypse" if veqq hadn't. Your link is helpful, but still puzzling. If the onset of Office 365 got rid of tons of staff teams at universities and non-tech big companies, but each team only had a single-digit number of people, can you really call that an apocalypse?
  - mike_d 3y ago
    Microsoft sales folks ran around to all the large organizations with on-prem mail systems (both Unix based and Exchange) offering deeply discounted Office licenses and free UNISYS contractors for migrations if the org would commit to moving to paid O365 seats. Lots of well built and managed systems were tossed out for short term discounts, locking people into a glorified version of Hotmail.
- stakhanov 3y ago
MarkSweep 3y ago
They do have a competitor product suite, though I have no idea how good it is: https://aws.amazon.com/business-applications/productivity-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/business-applications/productivity-ap... There is an office suit, email, video conferencing, and a no-code platform. Though Word Docs does not sound like a strong competitor. It either works with MS Office or with Amazon-hosted Hancom ThinkFree. ThinkFree does not support some basic features like track changes and pivot tables: https://workdocs.thinkfree.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003147033-Unsupported-features https://workdocs.thinkfree.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000314703...
- somethoughts 3y ago
  Hmm.. that does look pretty comprehensive - more than I remembered. Makes the 0365 deal even weirder. Is it for Teams?
  - mcny 3y ago
    Teams is (was? I'm still on classic at work) such hot garbage. Ctrl Shift V is paste unformatted. You'd think Ctrl Shift C is copy unformatted but no. It is call whatever char you're on. Doesn't matter if there are ten people in the chat. Here's the kicker: you can't reassign or remove shortcuts. Amazon must really hate Chime if it wants to move to teams.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fbdab103 3y ago

I really like this idea. I would totally pay Amazon for email, and would not have many reservations recommending it to tech illiterate. If you are going to get in bed with BigTech, Amazon feels the least bad to me (but they are all horrible for different reasons).

thih9 3y ago
Why does Amazon feel the least bad to you? Is there some deeper reason?
- stakhanov 3y ago
  Well, if the current choice is between Gmail and Outlook, it seems like bad mojo that all the operators of e-mail are also operators of advertising networks; they are the "attention brokers" of the world. Amazon has people pay them for infrastructure and has no line of busines that seems like a conflict of interests. (Online retailing doesn't seem like one, for example).
  - abadpoli 3y ago
    Advertising is one of Amazon’s largest and most profitable business units, fwiw. https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-the-most-powerful-advertising-machine-in-the-world-135753395.html https://finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/amazon-is-quietly-bui...
    - stakhanov 3y ago
      It's hard for me to relate this accounting category that the article is talking about to actual Amazon products. I mean, of course you can rebrand the "marketplace" concept as "advertising", but which of Amazon's products would I be using, if I just have a link that I want people to click on, and I assume that my target audience is not already on the amazon retail website? -- It sort of depends on what you define as "advertising", but to me it means shoving stuff in my face that I didn't want shoved in my face. If I go to "amazon.com", I'm voluntarily saying "sell me stuff, I actually need to buy something right now".
      - therealpygon 3y ago
        You seem to be confusing Amazon (the company), with only Amazon (the online retail website). The Amazon Company has a number of advertising vehicles outside of just their retail website. There is also a significant amount of advertising within their retail website as well. Have you not noticed all of the “sponsored” listings and other types of ads for (often inferior) products to show up under your search terms? Beyond that, “ad revenue” is often the vehicle for accounting data brokering due to the significant amount of tracking they do across all their various sites. There is also direct video ad revenue that comes from Twitch, is planned for Amazon Prime, so on and so forth. There is no pick-and-choose in the way advertising would be defined, like you suggest. Advertising is just that; content that has either been paid for another party to show, has received payment to show, or the analytics/tracking data used to influence buyers or is marketed to sellers and other companies. By your definition, google’s ads in search results and targeted in websites wouldn’t be advertising either, because you [paraphrasing] “asked for it”.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  At least Amazon has support. Good luck if something happens to your Gmail account.

mike_d 3y ago

In your mind what would have been a smart acquisition? Why do you think the number of players who could "scale" is so small? Up until the O365 apocalypse, there were tons of people operating 100k to 1m user email systems on a few servers with a single digit number of staff (i.e. every university and most big non-tech companies). As you mention email is super sticky. I can't fathom an argument where OneMedical didn't get them more room for innovation than buying/building a solution to a problem that was solved in 2004.

veqq 3y ago
What was the O365 apocalypse?
- coryrc 3y ago
  Follow this back a few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1230573/microsoft-on-premise-vs-cloud-exchange-mailboxes/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1230573/microsoft-on-pre... (Sorry I don't have a more-thorough link, though just those three years tell the story themselves)
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    I would have asked mike_d about the "O365 apocalypse" if veqq hadn't. Your link is helpful, but still puzzling. If the onset of Office 365 got rid of tons of staff teams at universities and non-tech big companies, but each team only had a single-digit number of people, can you really call that an apocalypse?
- mike_d 3y ago
  Microsoft sales folks ran around to all the large organizations with on-prem mail systems (both Unix based and Exchange) offering deeply discounted Office licenses and free UNISYS contractors for migrations if the org would commit to moving to paid O365 seats. Lots of well built and managed systems were tossed out for short term discounts, locking people into a glorified version of Hotmail.
stakhanov 3y ago

MarkSweep 3y ago

They do have a competitor product suite, though I have no idea how good it is: https://aws.amazon.com/business-applications/productivity-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/business-applications/productivity-ap... There is an office suit, email, video conferencing, and a no-code platform. Though Word Docs does not sound like a strong competitor. It either works with MS Office or with Amazon-hosted Hancom ThinkFree. ThinkFree does not support some basic features like track changes and pivot tables: https://workdocs.thinkfree.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003147033-Unsupported-features https://workdocs.thinkfree.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000314703...

somethoughts 3y ago
Hmm.. that does look pretty comprehensive - more than I remembered. Makes the 0365 deal even weirder. Is it for Teams?
- mcny 3y ago
  Teams is (was? I'm still on classic at work) such hot garbage. Ctrl Shift V is paste unformatted. You'd think Ctrl Shift C is copy unformatted but no. It is call whatever char you're on. Doesn't matter if there are ten people in the chat. Here's the kicker: you can't reassign or remove shortcuts. Amazon must really hate Chime if it wants to move to teams.