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Marc Andreessen Annotates Paul Krugman's Amazon Op-Ed

27 points by lawsohard 12y ago

MaysonL 12y ago
I wonder if diapers.com had been an Andreessen investment if his take on Amazon would be the same?
driverdan 12y ago
> Krugman is one of the most important writers and the world, and nearly always gets it right. I stopped reading right there.
Tloewald 12y ago
I always find it amusing when someone snipes at someone else's writing and still comes off second best.
kirinan 12y ago
Andreessen makes some really excellent points in there, but there a few that just strike me as incorrect: > Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power. Yeah its both. You can be a monopoly by having ridiculously high or low prices, mainly its really low then really high and if you think Amazon wouldnt raise everything by 100$ if it could, you're just wrong. > It will startle every single business owner and CEO in the world to learn that negotiating with suppliers is now a business tactic that is “out of line”. No negotiating is smart. Strong arming is wrong. Amazon is strong arming people not negotiating. They are playing the game where if you don't agree with what they are doing they are taking their toys and leaving. This causes economic harm to the company because of Amazon's volume to the point where the publishers have to use Amazon's terms which is monopolistic power.
- dminor 12y ago
  If Amazon wants to charge less for Hachette's ebooks, how would you have them negotiate that?
- ameister14 12y ago
  The case mentioned a lot in the article, that of Standard Oil, is one where prices were kept very low, and continuously lowered through improved efficiency. Even when they had 90% market share, Standard Oil kept prices low for consumers. There's a real argument to be made about the efficiency of monopoly, particularly where a destructive pattern of competitive behavior had been the norm previously. Rockefeller made that argument, albeit unsuccessfully at the time, but I don't think it is any less compelling for that. Even if you allow that Amazon is a monopoly, competition is not intrinsically good. Competition is generally good where it improved the options and prices available for the consumer. That wasn't really the case with big publishing companies before.
- fleitz 12y ago
  That's pretty much how negotiation works. If a company doesn't give me the raise I want, I accept an offer from a company that does give me the raise I want: "Taking my toys and going home" If you say "Well, I don't agree with you, however, I'm going home and leaving my toys here for you to play with" then you'll probably end up at home without any toys. Taking your toys and going home is your BATNA. Hachette has a shitty BATNA and is hence losing the negotiation, because they don't have any toys Amazon wants, and hence Amazon doesn't care they are going to go home and whine to daddy Krugman that little Jeffery isn't sharing his toys. It's 2014, taking words from a text file from some author, putting them into a PDF isn't some kind of miracle that warrants 90% of the cost of the book.
StefanKarpinski 12y ago
Is it just me or is the Genius interface kind of confusing? Is there any way to see just Marc Andreessen's comments and not the comments of a bunch of other randos too?
ohazi 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that inline responses usually end up making the replying author sound childish and petty?
- nostrademons 12y ago
  This is an interesting observation. I wonder if it's because, on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy [1], inline annotations strongly encourage DH3 responses, make it challenging to write DH4-5 (because of lack of space, and interruption of the flow of the main piece), and outright make it impossible to write a DH6 response. That doesn't necessarily make them bad - often you can provide useful elaboration or contradict factual assertions - but I think you're right that they do have a petty vibe to them. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
  - ohazi 12y ago
    Ah, this is great. I had forgotten about this essay. I think this part is particularly relevant: > Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit one's opponent. It's really easy to end up doing this when replying inline.
snewman 12y ago
I'm not sure how impressed I am by Marc's arguments. For instance: > Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power. This seems silly. Krugman doesn't say that Amazon's low prices are a sign that they have monopoly power. He's saying that Amazon uses low prices to acquire or maintain ("reinforce") monopoly power ("dominance").
TillE 12y ago
This format is terrible for both usability (click click click click) and general coherence. A plain old fisking would be vastly superior.
gahahaha 12y ago
I can't imagine that this stuff is legal - the NYT has paid Krugman to write this, and Genious is just copying the text and adding a few (to my mind inane) links and comments. It all seems very shady..
- leggo2m 12y ago
  Not only that, they don't even link to the original NYT article! This is less a deconstruction of Krugman's article than it is a self-promotion of Crap Genius.
lmg643 12y ago
Wow. Talk about an advertisement for the ineffectiveness of annotations. I've got comments from multiple different authors on here simultaneously - who are all these people? I was interested in Marc's annotations - talk about bait and switch. For complex subjects, this is a great example of why single-author critiques are best, so you can follow a single person's train of thought and their logical conclusions (or errors). This particular debate strikes me as pretty juvenile in both directions - by Krugman, and his critics. Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." Of course, that's not to say any big company can't overplay its leverage in "supplier negotiations" and this is surely something worth discussing. Marc is also right that the judgment here is a lot more nuanced than standard oil owning 60% of the market. Going a little deeper on the Hachette dust-up, it's really interesting that the chattering classes never took much of an axe to Amazon's reputation until it tread on their turf - book publishing! All the waylaid mom-and-pop stores were just hicks who had it coming. Protecting the fat advances paid to big name authors - that is sacrosanct - part of the rewards that go with public life these days, and part of the corruption IMHO. I will end with Glazer's beginning - "Krugman nearly always gets it right...but this is very wrong." I find that this Amazon critique is easier to contextualize if you shift that understanding - Krugman is frequently wrong about many things, and this Amazon article fits neatly with that overall trend.
- ameister14 12y ago
  >Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." That's not really what he says, he said that if they raised prices, Krugman would take that as evidence of monopoly behavior as well. Monopolies don't always raise prices; sometimes they keep them quite low.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    Marc should know about monopolies. Microsoft started giving web browsers for free to undercut Netscape's business model. Once your competitors go out of business, you would be free to raise your prices.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
CyberDildonics 12y ago
Marc Andreesen getting trolled by Paul Krugman, a modern master of trolling.

27 points by lawsohard 12y ago

I wonder if diapers.com had been an Andreessen investment if his take on Amazon would be the same?

> Krugman is one of the most important writers and the world, and nearly always gets it right. I stopped reading right there.

Tloewald 12y ago

I always find it amusing when someone snipes at someone else's writing and still comes off second best.

kirinan 12y ago

Andreessen makes some really excellent points in there, but there a few that just strike me as incorrect: > Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power. Yeah its both. You can be a monopoly by having ridiculously high or low prices, mainly its really low then really high and if you think Amazon wouldnt raise everything by 100$ if it could, you're just wrong. > It will startle every single business owner and CEO in the world to learn that negotiating with suppliers is now a business tactic that is “out of line”. No negotiating is smart. Strong arming is wrong. Amazon is strong arming people not negotiating. They are playing the game where if you don't agree with what they are doing they are taking their toys and leaving. This causes economic harm to the company because of Amazon's volume to the point where the publishers have to use Amazon's terms which is monopolistic power.

dminor 12y ago
If Amazon wants to charge less for Hachette's ebooks, how would you have them negotiate that?
ameister14 12y ago
The case mentioned a lot in the article, that of Standard Oil, is one where prices were kept very low, and continuously lowered through improved efficiency. Even when they had 90% market share, Standard Oil kept prices low for consumers. There's a real argument to be made about the efficiency of monopoly, particularly where a destructive pattern of competitive behavior had been the norm previously. Rockefeller made that argument, albeit unsuccessfully at the time, but I don't think it is any less compelling for that. Even if you allow that Amazon is a monopoly, competition is not intrinsically good. Competition is generally good where it improved the options and prices available for the consumer. That wasn't really the case with big publishing companies before.
fleitz 12y ago
That's pretty much how negotiation works. If a company doesn't give me the raise I want, I accept an offer from a company that does give me the raise I want: "Taking my toys and going home" If you say "Well, I don't agree with you, however, I'm going home and leaving my toys here for you to play with" then you'll probably end up at home without any toys. Taking your toys and going home is your BATNA. Hachette has a shitty BATNA and is hence losing the negotiation, because they don't have any toys Amazon wants, and hence Amazon doesn't care they are going to go home and whine to daddy Krugman that little Jeffery isn't sharing his toys. It's 2014, taking words from a text file from some author, putting them into a PDF isn't some kind of miracle that warrants 90% of the cost of the book.

StefanKarpinski 12y ago

Is it just me or is the Genius interface kind of confusing? Is there any way to see just Marc Andreessen's comments and not the comments of a bunch of other randos too?

ohazi 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that inline responses usually end up making the replying author sound childish and petty?

nostrademons 12y ago
This is an interesting observation. I wonder if it's because, on Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy [1], inline annotations strongly encourage DH3 responses, make it challenging to write DH4-5 (because of lack of space, and interruption of the flow of the main piece), and outright make it impossible to write a DH6 response. That doesn't necessarily make them bad - often you can provide useful elaboration or contradict factual assertions - but I think you're right that they do have a petty vibe to them. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- ohazi 12y ago
  Ah, this is great. I had forgotten about this essay. I think this part is particularly relevant: > Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit one's opponent. It's really easy to end up doing this when replying inline.

snewman 12y ago

I'm not sure how impressed I am by Marc's arguments. For instance: > Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power. This seems silly. Krugman doesn't say that Amazon's low prices are a sign that they have monopoly power. He's saying that Amazon uses low prices to acquire or maintain ("reinforce") monopoly power ("dominance").

TillE 12y ago

This format is terrible for both usability (click click click click) and general coherence. A plain old fisking would be vastly superior.

gahahaha 12y ago

I can't imagine that this stuff is legal - the NYT has paid Krugman to write this, and Genious is just copying the text and adding a few (to my mind inane) links and comments. It all seems very shady..

leggo2m 12y ago
Not only that, they don't even link to the original NYT article! This is less a deconstruction of Krugman's article than it is a self-promotion of Crap Genius.

lmg643 12y ago

Wow. Talk about an advertisement for the ineffectiveness of annotations. I've got comments from multiple different authors on here simultaneously - who are all these people? I was interested in Marc's annotations - talk about bait and switch. For complex subjects, this is a great example of why single-author critiques are best, so you can follow a single person's train of thought and their logical conclusions (or errors). This particular debate strikes me as pretty juvenile in both directions - by Krugman, and his critics. Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." Of course, that's not to say any big company can't overplay its leverage in "supplier negotiations" and this is surely something worth discussing. Marc is also right that the judgment here is a lot more nuanced than standard oil owning 60% of the market. Going a little deeper on the Hachette dust-up, it's really interesting that the chattering classes never took much of an axe to Amazon's reputation until it tread on their turf - book publishing! All the waylaid mom-and-pop stores were just hicks who had it coming. Protecting the fat advances paid to big name authors - that is sacrosanct - part of the rewards that go with public life these days, and part of the corruption IMHO. I will end with Glazer's beginning - "Krugman nearly always gets it right...but this is very wrong." I find that this Amazon critique is easier to contextualize if you shift that understanding - Krugman is frequently wrong about many things, and this Amazon article fits neatly with that overall trend.

ameister14 12y ago
>Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." That's not really what he says, he said that if they raised prices, Krugman would take that as evidence of monopoly behavior as well. Monopolies don't always raise prices; sometimes they keep them quite low.
- pkaye 12y ago
  Marc should know about monopolies. Microsoft started giving web browsers for free to undercut Netscape's business model. Once your competitors go out of business, you would be free to raise your prices.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

CyberDildonics 12y ago

Marc Andreesen getting trolled by Paul Krugman, a modern master of trolling.