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Amazon really aren't on the radar round here nearly as much as they should be. As some in this thread have pointed out their strategy is to spend absolutely all

Amazon really aren't on the radar round here nearly as much as they should be. As some in this thread have pointed out their strategy is to spend absolutely all income on slightly out there R&D, which in the case of things like their web services wildly over return. Just because they aren't based in the valley and make Apple look positively liberal when it comes to secrecy and working practices doesn't mean they should be ignored. Quite honestly I think they're the single most terrifying company in the US today, an idea Bezos would take as a compliment. The big picture is they are gunning to become the universal middle men for when people actually spend money on the net. Google only have the ad side of things together, but never really cracked getting end users to open their wallets, yet Amazon are in the position of starting in front of users, and slowly moving themselves into being the background glue between everything else, facilitating transactions between everyone while taking their cut and enforcing their rules. Terrifying, and brilliant.

iLoch 12y ago
I wish they'd try harder with their payments business - they could be in a position to compete with Stripe or Paypal but instead force users to pay with their Amazon accounts. That doesn't make sense as a business strategy to me.
- S4M 12y ago
  Wouldn't that be a blatant abuse of dominant position?
  - jamesaguilar 12y ago
    If they had any monopolies, as interpreted by the us government, that could be an issue.
- bellerocky 12y ago
  It's interesting you didn't mention Square, I think a sign of how much Square has fallen. Two years ago payment and Square were often mentioned in the same breath around here.
  - iLoch 12y ago
    I just opted to mention Stripe and Paypal because PayPal is still the dominant force overall, and Stripe has the kind of API that developers love - a combination that Amazon is capable of creating.
  - hmsimha 12y ago
    Square is primarily focused on working with brick & mortar vendors to accept physical credit card payments. Stripe and Paypal are solutions for individuals, businesses, and retailers to accept payments online. I think iLoch was suggesting Amazon should compete on the latter front.
  - djur 12y ago
    Is Square not doing well? I've actually been seeing it a lot more recently -- lots of food carts and street vendors do the iPad-and-cardreader setup, and I've seen a number of the POS systems in coffee shops and the like. I've also noticed cab drivers using it. I'm not seeing people use it for splitting bills and the like as much, but I got the impression Square was making a conscious shift away from that market and toward small brick-and-mortar (or truck-and-van?) businesses.
    - bellerocky 12y ago
      > Is Square not doing well? Square reached too high a valuation off of low value business with merchants. They have burned through staggering amounts of cash, canceled high profiled products, and purchased payment-unrelated startups and made other changes. The high valuation they've had in funding rounds makes them an unattractive purchase because the business they have isn't worth what it would cost. To get new money they'd have to do something like foursquare did to raise money, which dilutes everyone's current equity to very little. They probably can turn it into some kind of business but the growth has stalled, the equity employees have is at risk and they've all but lost the sparkle that excites the press when they talk about the company. They could gain momentum back, it's not impossible, and they have really, really good engineers and designers so that's a plus.
      - 12y ago
- untog 12y ago
  Well, if they were a payment provider they might end up providing services to their competitors. Maybe they don't want to give away a single benefit.
grimtrigger 12y ago
I always wondered why Amazon never launched a search engine. The only thing I could think of was a fear of invoking regulation.
- siglesias 12y ago
  They do have the world's best search engine for products.
  - korzun 12y ago
    Not if you are looking for something outside the typical scope. I buy tons of wierd automotive parts that are not 'well known' and usually end up using Google to find products on Amazon. Their search engine is actually pretty limiting in some ways.
    - bagels 12y ago
      There's truth in this. Generally, I search for part numbers on google or rockauto, and then you can find them on amazon. The UX for finding parts that fit your car on amazon is either confusing or broken, I'm not sure which.
      - jethro_tell 12y ago
        Both. This may because of the existing parts distribution system already in place. It doesn't see to be a place they have been putting much effort into. There wasn't even auto part search until recently.
  - chx 12y ago
    Really? I thought they have the worst. Check https://twitter.com/chx/status/360508662227292160 https://twitter.com/chx/status/360508662227292160 this for example.
    - anonymoushn 12y ago
      I tried to reproduce this result. After searching "Nexus 7 bluetooth keyboard case", I got a page full of relevant results. I could get to a page full of awful results by first selecting a department, then sorting by average rating.
vacri 12y ago
They're not as secretive as Apple. We use AWS and I'm often talking to our account manager or support, and they're always talking about upcoming products and features in the pipeline. They just don't give ETAs, which is sensible, to ensure customers aren't banking on feature X being available on date Y. They also advertise some of their working practices when it benefits them (eg datacentre physical staff don't have logical access), but to be honest, there aren't a lot of big companies out there that openly advertise their internal processes. They're also being extremely open about wanting to be The Middle Man when it comes to cloud, nothing stealthy about it at all. I just went to a free AWS summit, where the VP giving the keynote said as much - how is it possible to accuse them of secrecy when they paid for a big venue for me to visit, just in order to tell me exactly that factoid? They are worth watching due to monopolistic concerns, sure, but there's so much FUD out there about them.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Amazon is in many ways a more interesting company than google. Amazon's offerings are becoming more and more diversified and they're industry leaders in more than one area. And they are making a strong push at maintaining growth/expansion. Amazon has a strong history of expanding their business and building new highly valuable products with staying power. Google has only expanded a little in terms of actual functional products, most of their additions have been via acquisitions, and they have not done well at monetizing or even supporting many of their new product offerings. Google is primarily search + backbone ISP, that's where almost all of their revenue comes from, everything else falls into a tiny "other" category. Indicative of their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products and high revenue businesses. The only downside is that the work environment is more than a little dysfunctional.
- jerrickhoang 12y ago
  I wouldn't say gmail, maps, chrome, docs, calendar indicate 'their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products.' Also, buying a product doesn't mean you're done with it. I personally think what the folks at Android, Youtube and Nest etc have been doing is incredible.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    How many of those are actually well monetized? Almost none. How many of them contribute a major portion of revenue back to the company? Absolutely none of them. Google is good at launching products, they're not good at maturing them. Chrome is a fantastic piece of software, and it fulfills it's purpose for google quite well, but it's not a product in the way that AWS or the kindle is a product. Google is good at development, excellent in fact. But they get stuck in the hard middle parts of product development. They fail to monetize products well and they fail to mature products into their full potential. Partly that's because product development at google is basically just play-time. As I said, revenue for google derives from a tiny subset of products (search and network almost exclusively), everything else is just a side project. As such, when a product doesn't meet its potential or doesn't bring in billions in revenue that is not an issue at all at google, it's the expected case. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad. Docs/drive has stagnated relative to what it could have been for years. Amazon is almost diametrically opposite. They productize well, extremely well, but they have a horrid working environment in regard to devs.
eclipxe 12y ago
They aren't based in the valley, but Amazon does have a large presence in SV - both it's Lab126 office(s) in Sunnyvale/Cupertino and SF offices.

iLoch 12y ago

I wish they'd try harder with their payments business - they could be in a position to compete with Stripe or Paypal but instead force users to pay with their Amazon accounts. That doesn't make sense as a business strategy to me.

S4M 12y ago
Wouldn't that be a blatant abuse of dominant position?
- jamesaguilar 12y ago
  If they had any monopolies, as interpreted by the us government, that could be an issue.
bellerocky 12y ago
It's interesting you didn't mention Square, I think a sign of how much Square has fallen. Two years ago payment and Square were often mentioned in the same breath around here.
- iLoch 12y ago
  I just opted to mention Stripe and Paypal because PayPal is still the dominant force overall, and Stripe has the kind of API that developers love - a combination that Amazon is capable of creating.
- hmsimha 12y ago
  Square is primarily focused on working with brick & mortar vendors to accept physical credit card payments. Stripe and Paypal are solutions for individuals, businesses, and retailers to accept payments online. I think iLoch was suggesting Amazon should compete on the latter front.
- djur 12y ago
  Is Square not doing well? I've actually been seeing it a lot more recently -- lots of food carts and street vendors do the iPad-and-cardreader setup, and I've seen a number of the POS systems in coffee shops and the like. I've also noticed cab drivers using it. I'm not seeing people use it for splitting bills and the like as much, but I got the impression Square was making a conscious shift away from that market and toward small brick-and-mortar (or truck-and-van?) businesses.
  - bellerocky 12y ago
    > Is Square not doing well? Square reached too high a valuation off of low value business with merchants. They have burned through staggering amounts of cash, canceled high profiled products, and purchased payment-unrelated startups and made other changes. The high valuation they've had in funding rounds makes them an unattractive purchase because the business they have isn't worth what it would cost. To get new money they'd have to do something like foursquare did to raise money, which dilutes everyone's current equity to very little. They probably can turn it into some kind of business but the growth has stalled, the equity employees have is at risk and they've all but lost the sparkle that excites the press when they talk about the company. They could gain momentum back, it's not impossible, and they have really, really good engineers and designers so that's a plus.
    - 12y ago
untog 12y ago
Well, if they were a payment provider they might end up providing services to their competitors. Maybe they don't want to give away a single benefit.

grimtrigger 12y ago

I always wondered why Amazon never launched a search engine. The only thing I could think of was a fear of invoking regulation.

siglesias 12y ago
They do have the world's best search engine for products.
- korzun 12y ago
  Not if you are looking for something outside the typical scope. I buy tons of wierd automotive parts that are not 'well known' and usually end up using Google to find products on Amazon. Their search engine is actually pretty limiting in some ways.
  - bagels 12y ago
    There's truth in this. Generally, I search for part numbers on google or rockauto, and then you can find them on amazon. The UX for finding parts that fit your car on amazon is either confusing or broken, I'm not sure which.
    - jethro_tell 12y ago
      Both. This may because of the existing parts distribution system already in place. It doesn't see to be a place they have been putting much effort into. There wasn't even auto part search until recently.
- chx 12y ago
  Really? I thought they have the worst. Check https://twitter.com/chx/status/360508662227292160 https://twitter.com/chx/status/360508662227292160 this for example.
  - anonymoushn 12y ago
    I tried to reproduce this result. After searching "Nexus 7 bluetooth keyboard case", I got a page full of relevant results. I could get to a page full of awful results by first selecting a department, then sorting by average rating.

vacri 12y ago

They're not as secretive as Apple. We use AWS and I'm often talking to our account manager or support, and they're always talking about upcoming products and features in the pipeline. They just don't give ETAs, which is sensible, to ensure customers aren't banking on feature X being available on date Y. They also advertise some of their working practices when it benefits them (eg datacentre physical staff don't have logical access), but to be honest, there aren't a lot of big companies out there that openly advertise their internal processes. They're also being extremely open about wanting to be The Middle Man when it comes to cloud, nothing stealthy about it at all. I just went to a free AWS summit, where the VP giving the keynote said as much - how is it possible to accuse them of secrecy when they paid for a big venue for me to visit, just in order to tell me exactly that factoid? They are worth watching due to monopolistic concerns, sure, but there's so much FUD out there about them.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Amazon is in many ways a more interesting company than google. Amazon's offerings are becoming more and more diversified and they're industry leaders in more than one area. And they are making a strong push at maintaining growth/expansion. Amazon has a strong history of expanding their business and building new highly valuable products with staying power. Google has only expanded a little in terms of actual functional products, most of their additions have been via acquisitions, and they have not done well at monetizing or even supporting many of their new product offerings. Google is primarily search + backbone ISP, that's where almost all of their revenue comes from, everything else falls into a tiny "other" category. Indicative of their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products and high revenue businesses. The only downside is that the work environment is more than a little dysfunctional.

jerrickhoang 12y ago
I wouldn't say gmail, maps, chrome, docs, calendar indicate 'their utter inability to effectively spinoff new products.' Also, buying a product doesn't mean you're done with it. I personally think what the folks at Android, Youtube and Nest etc have been doing is incredible.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  How many of those are actually well monetized? Almost none. How many of them contribute a major portion of revenue back to the company? Absolutely none of them. Google is good at launching products, they're not good at maturing them. Chrome is a fantastic piece of software, and it fulfills it's purpose for google quite well, but it's not a product in the way that AWS or the kindle is a product. Google is good at development, excellent in fact. But they get stuck in the hard middle parts of product development. They fail to monetize products well and they fail to mature products into their full potential. Partly that's because product development at google is basically just play-time. As I said, revenue for google derives from a tiny subset of products (search and network almost exclusively), everything else is just a side project. As such, when a product doesn't meet its potential or doesn't bring in billions in revenue that is not an issue at all at google, it's the expected case. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad. Docs/drive has stagnated relative to what it could have been for years. Amazon is almost diametrically opposite. They productize well, extremely well, but they have a horrid working environment in regard to devs.

eclipxe 12y ago

They aren't based in the valley, but Amazon does have a large presence in SV - both it's Lab126 office(s) in Sunnyvale/Cupertino and SF offices.