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people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me stupid for buying their stock...

by singularity2001 2y ago

empath75 2y ago
Depending on when you bought it, it was a pretty risky play until AWS came out and got traction. Their retail business _still_ doesn't make money.
bmitc 2y ago
Why does everyone always like to compare every company to Amazon? Those companies are never like Amazon, which is one of the most entrenched companies ever.
- ben_w 2y ago
  While I agree the comparison is not going to provide useful insights, in fairness to them Amazon wasn't entrenched at the time they were making huge losses each year.
ben_w 2y ago
As I recall, while Amazon was doing this, there was no comparable competition from other vendors that properly understood the internet as a marketplace? Closest was eBay? There is real competition now that plenty of big box stores' websites also list things you won't see in the stores themselves*, but then also Amazon is also making a profit now. I think the current situation with LLMs is a dollar auction, where everyone is incentivised to pay increasing costs to outbid the others, even though this has gone from "maximise reward" to "minimise losses": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction * One of my local supermarkets in Germany sells 4-room "garden sheds" that are substantially larger than the apartment I own in the UK: https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/
bigstrat2003 2y ago
And for every Amazon, there are a hundred other companies that went out of business because they never could figure out how to turn a profit. You made a bet which paid off and that's cool, but that doesn't mean the people telling you it was a bad bet were wrong.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Amazon was losing money because it was building the moat It's not clear that OpenAI has any moat to build

people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me stupid for buying their stock...

Depending on when you bought it, it was a pretty risky play until AWS came out and got traction. Their retail business _still_ doesn't make money.

bmitc 2y ago

Why does everyone always like to compare every company to Amazon? Those companies are never like Amazon, which is one of the most entrenched companies ever.

ben_w 2y ago
While I agree the comparison is not going to provide useful insights, in fairness to them Amazon wasn't entrenched at the time they were making huge losses each year.

ben_w 2y ago

As I recall, while Amazon was doing this, there was no comparable competition from other vendors that properly understood the internet as a marketplace? Closest was eBay? There is real competition now that plenty of big box stores' websites also list things you won't see in the stores themselves*, but then also Amazon is also making a profit now. I think the current situation with LLMs is a dollar auction, where everyone is incentivised to pay increasing costs to outbid the others, even though this has gone from "maximise reward" to "minimise losses": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction * One of my local supermarkets in Germany sells 4-room "garden sheds" that are substantially larger than the apartment I own in the UK: https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/ https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/

bigstrat2003 2y ago

And for every Amazon, there are a hundred other companies that went out of business because they never could figure out how to turn a profit. You made a bet which paid off and that's cool, but that doesn't mean the people telling you it was a bad bet were wrong.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Amazon was losing money because it was building the moat It's not clear that OpenAI has any moat to build