7 ms·

Of all the big internet giants, I think Amazon will be the hardest to disrupt. Androind could eat away at Apple. Google's search could in theory be disrupted.

• godbolev 13y ago
  > Facebook seems more vulnerable by the day. Why would you say that? I'm just curious.
• kin3tic 13y ago
  Android could eat away at Apple? Sometimes I wonder if I live in the same reality as everyone else.
• mgkimsal 13y ago
  An internal Amazon company motto is, "it's still day 1." That's their view -- that it's still the early days of the internet. That's why they reinvest so heavily, because it's still early days. MS people I spoke with as late as the late 90s still considered themselves to be a 'startup' (though not using that term), but were quick to point out that they could get disrupted in any market - they were playing in many fields, but weren't dominant ("yet", in their minds). I think this was perpetuated by the sr mgt in anticipation of the anti-trust trials - 'look, we're not some big monopoly - we're a scrappy startup that could fail/lose big at any time!'. I'm not sure anyone believed it, but also not sure that anyone in the mid 90s might have foreseen a time when MS wasn't a dominant player, but here we are. They're still big, and they matter, in some markets, but very few people are afraid of them any more, or even care what their plans for the future are. People fear Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. MS is, if not totally dead man walking, in grave danger of becoming that without anyone (including their mgt) even noticing.
  • nwzpaperman 13y ago
    You should probably buy some MSFT at the open tomorrow and fund it with a short position in AMZN. For posterity's sake, the closing price of both companies today was: 8/8/2013 AMZN: $295.74 @ $135.12 billion market cap MSFT: $32.89 @ $273.97 billion market cap
    • gjm11 13y ago
      He thinks Microsoft is in trouble and Amazon is strong ... so you suggest he should short Amazon to buy Microsoft?
      • mgkimsal 13y ago
        Thank you - I wasn't sure what the point of that was, other than illustrating that perhaps I don't make my points clear enough. :)
        • nwzpaperman 13y ago
          I think you are a tradeable fade!
          • mgkimsal 13y ago
            I get that a lot, actually. Still trying to figure out what it means, but thank you.
    • melvinmt 13y ago
      What is your point exactly? These numbers don't mean anything in an investment point of view. You can't compare them.
• taway2012 13y ago
  This is probably contrarian ... I wonder if people will still go by default to Amazon if they're not the cheapest. For instance, Newegg always sells for a few dollars more than Amazon. Heck Amazon even sells for a couple of bucks less than their own subsidiary, Zappos. I seriously doubt that Amazon's retail operation has demonstrated that they can retain customers while raising prices. Unless I missed some news/data. Would be glad to hear comments.
  • jmduke 13y ago
    Overstock.com recently launched a promotional campaign selling all their hardcovers for 10% less than Amazon.com.
    • paul_f 13y ago
      That's funny because I sort of forgot Amazon started selling books. I don't think of them as a bookstore anymore at all. Maybe that says something.
  • AmVess 13y ago
    I'm just one person, but I shop Amazon all the time due to the sheer convenience of doing so...regardless of price. Why? Free shipping (I get mine free, but $80 is well worth it because I buy a lot of stuff), always 2 days shipping, excellent service and a huge variety of goodies to buy. I also have their rewards card which returns $... Free coupla hundred bucks every six months, no sweat. I mentioned convenience as an opener to this reply, and I'll close with it. In a world wherein lots of things become more and more of a PITA, Amazon delivers easy and pain free, every day (I don't work there, so I can say that).
  • robryan 13y ago
    I think to some extent yes. Some of the stuff we sell via Amazons marketplace is the cheapest on the marketplace but by no means the cheapest online. This stuff doesn't come with the same kind of shipping service that Amazon provides either, people feel safe buying through Amazon though in that the very worse outcome they can come out with is their money back. So other sites need to not only be cheaper but also build up the same level of service and trust to get a large amount of people away from Amazon.
• bane 13y ago
  I recently went to two malls in my area that, when I last visited them a decade ago were bustling with shoppers. In one mall, I walked through a Macy's that may have had only 5 shoppers (I'm reserving "customers" as we weren't one until we actually bought something) in the entire store. The tile floor of the store was crumbling, wallpaper was peeling, everything felt old and ancient. I didn't want to be there. In one mall, there was an entire wing of the mall that was almost completely abandoned and probably 30-40% of the mall was vacant store fronts. The food court I used to spend hours in consisted of a McDonald's and a Chinese fast food place. I remember years ago when it hosted a dozen different places, all with long lines. Getting a table to eat at required a friend to go reserve a table for you. These days? 3 people eat big macs in an empty large echoy room. It used to be the social center for the town, today it's nearly abandoned. Amazon and other online shopping venues decimated these brick and mortar shopping venues. And it's not clear that it's generating the same amount of raw revenue in return either. It's definitely annihilating retail jobs in a way that Walmart could never hope to approach, yet it's rarely if ever discussed. At best, retail Macy's jobs are being replaced with contract warehouse work at a local fulfillment center, but automation and the loss of the requirement to interface with the customer means these places only require a fraction of the employees to move the same volume of inventory. I don't know if the pendulum will ever swing the other way. My wife for example, buys clothes almost exclusively on-line. It's almost unthinkable that she does this, you want to try on clothes after all. But she overbuys a little, and only goes to the physical store to return items that don't fit or she doesn't like. The once proud storefront has been turned into the return counter in the customer service center. Why? "I don't like dealing with all the crowds and it's such a hassle to go there to see if things are on sale, I'll just check the web site every few days instead." About the only brick and mortar we hit with any regularity these days is Costco, and that's largely because their wine selection is cheaper than online and very nearly always well selected and we can buy bulk toiletries and cleaning supplies at a discount.
  • aestra 13y ago
    Some malls are dying, some are thriving. Antidote is not data. There is one mall I've gone to the theater in a few times in recent memory, and it is swamped, I've almost get run down by shoppers at all times of the day, weekdays and weekends. Parking takes a long time to find. That's the only time I would go to that mall. I'd never shop there. Way too many people, only the theater for me. I've also been to dying malls. I've seen a few of them die over the years and are now dead. There are so many places where malls are thriving. A few years ago, I used to live in a different city, and at Christmas time I'd have to take a different road to work, because just driving by the mall made my commute twice as long, if not more because of the traffic. On a weekday. Taking the long way was much quicker.
• bedhead 13y ago
  Extremely well said. Amazon remains one of the most bizarre companies in the world, and I mean this as a huge compliment. The only other company I can think of that's managed like Amazon is Berkshire Hathaway (and maybe Exxon). I am talking in the sense that they are built for the loooong run. Not five or ten years from now, but decades from now. Five years - an eternity for most companies - is a blip on the radar for these guys. It's fascinating to watch.
  • jzwinck 13y ago
    What do Amazon (consumer goods), Berkshire (investments, many in "boring" companies), and Exxon (energy) have in common? They're all massive businesses with no product cycle (and mostly no recognizable "product" at all). They are unlikely to be quickly undone because not only does their business planning go on for decades, their customers do too. This is not a sufficient condition for corporate longevity (see: Hostess, Lehman, Enron), but it might be a necessary one.
• lotso 13y ago
  >Androind could eat away at Apple. Google's search could in theory be disrupted. Facebook seems more vulnerable by the day. Microsoft is a dead man walking. >Microsoft is a dead man walking. Why is the company with arguably the most diverse sources of income the one that is a dead man walking?
  • icefox 13y ago
    They might have diverse sources of income, but the majority comes from Windows and Office. For at least the last decade I was watched as many new companies have been run with mac/linux. This doesn't mean much when they are little five person startups, but as the years go by those startups grew and now we have some very large companies that are not based upon Microsoft and plenty of medium size ones. This creates a feedback look of employees that don't train people how to write microsoft a check each quarter, but how to use linux servers etc. It is hard to ignore this as a long term trend. In fact it is so weird/odd/rare that stories get posted here on HN about the reasons why startup X choose to be a MS shop. Saying I am going to use github, amazon and google apps wouldn't get any interest, it is simply what people do these days.
  • vijayr 13y ago
    Where I work, it is all Macs (100 people or so), iPhones and iPads - everything is Apple. 100 person company is tiny (by Microsoft standards), but consider 100 companies with 100 people each - suddenly it is not small anymore. Add to it some mid sized companies, and departments from big companies that slowly replace windows with Mac/Linux, it looks pretty bad. Microsoft's death won't be sudden like Myspace's. It will be slow and will spread over decades. Unless wake up. Purely from a engineering view, they are still a formidable player, and they invest in R&D more than anyone else. If they want, they can still make things happen.
  • zzleeper 13y ago
    Because most profits actually come from two cash flows that were in a much stronger position before
    • simonebrunozzi 13y ago