Amazon, the world’s most remarkable firm, is just getting started | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, the world’s most remarkable firm, is just getting started

economist.com

310 pointsgpresot320 comments

I've said before on hackernews, but people never seem to grasp the scope of Amazon. They aren't an e-commerce website anymore; that's just the tip of the iceberg. Bias: I spent a good five years there.

In logistics alone: hundreds of warehouses in a dozen countries; hundreds of delivery stations, a fleet of drivers (independent contractors all) in the tens or hundreds of thousands; a fleet of airplanes (and an airport I hear?); and I read an article a while back saying they were buying a big ol' container ship because why not? Oh and the drones of course, whenever they get off the ground (eh? see what I did there?)

Then you add on AWS, Kindle, the prototyped no-cash-register stores, and whatever else they've got cooking that no one knows about. This company is my best bet for "Weyland-Yutani" from the "Alien" series.

Also under logistics, "seller-fulfilled prime", adding good quality shippers to their delivery network.

I thought "seller-fulfilled prime" was just the seller shipping however they want as long as it was comparable to prime in shipping time. But only select sellers will be offered this.

It is impressive.

Do you think there's a chance of decline if Bezos leaves and the next Ballmer comes along? Profits up, but ultimately company declines and lets competitors eat it's lunch?

I don't.

Amazon is successful because of its fast moving, demanding culture. No product is ever left to coast - everyone is pushed to be bigger, faster, cheaper, etc. Amazon realizes this, and does a lot to reinforce its culture internally. They do an excellent job of this, even in remote offices. I think Bezos has done a terrific job of building something that will succeed without him. And that's a good thing for him - he's free to play with space travel, now.

That risk will always be there. But it seems like he has built a culture that will allow it to continue onward. If you think about it, Bezos is not like Jobs, where the latter had an outsized impact on deciding what things Apple would or would not make.

Are you sure this isn't purely a perceived decline? Microsoft's stock is the highest it's ever been and they made a profit of $52B in their last fiscal year.

I think that's mattmanser point. Profits look great and the stock price is happy, but mindshare in the consumer space, and perceived innovative edge (see the huge miss on phones)

Yes, definitely still a great company, but they've lost their complete dominance.

They made $16.7 billion in their last fiscal year, and 2015 and 2016 represented their lowest profits over the past 10 years.

Low profits tend to happen in the first years of a transition to subscription. See Adobe for another example.

You're using a non-recurring charge to try to make a wider point.

2015 had a $10 billion non-recurring, non-cash charge. Without that, your entire premise collapses.

The easiest way to poke a giant hole in what you're proposing, is to look at cash production from operations, which is the ultimate gauge of profitability. Their cash production the last two years is not the lowest over the past 10 years.

Net operating cash flow for 2016: $33 billion. Higher than 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

True. There are also much larger capital expenditures, and dividend payments.

I think Microsoft is doing tremendously well under Satya Nadella. I was making no other point except that the parent poster's comment about income were incorrect.

The culture is really pervasive at Amazon. Bezos started it, but now that the pinwheel is spinning, he doesn't need to do much to keep it going.

His major replacement potentials are Andrew Jassy (AWS CEO) and Jeff Wilke (CEO of Consumer, ie e-commerce and logistics). Both of those guys have done a fantastic jobs in the business they are in. I don't think Amazon would want to pull either of them into a roll of owning both though, lest they lose focus. I suspect they'd break them off as separate sub-companies (like Alphabet/Google did), and put someone else as the CEO of the overarching company.

But their core business ( selling products online) is selling too much counterfeit products ( as mentioned here).

But if the sales on Amazon would collapse, in an instant it would all be gone... ( except AWS)

PS. Don't know why i'm getting downvoted..

I remember reading one of the quarterly earnings reports last year. It said: Amazon as a whole (including AWS) made $500m that quarter. It also said that AWS made $600m that quarter.

What this means is that everything Amazon does that is not AWS lost $100m in a quarter. If you reduce the size of that, Amazon will make more money.

The breadth they are reaching really is impressive. The only other company which can really be compared with is Google and Microsoft. So far, Google's relationship with Amazon has been very weird, I'm curious to see how it evolves over time.

Let's not kid ourselves. Samsung and the other Korean chaebols, Mitsubishi and the Japanese keiretsus or even 3M have at least similar breadth.

Absolutely, but those are rarely discussed. I don't really get why, all of the firms you listed are incredible.

Probably because you only hang out on english-language forums full of people with similar views to your own.

Amazon is ~24 years old and already larger than all of them except Samsung (which they'll catch soon enough).

For example, Amazon is drastically larger than 3M. Four times the market cap, four times the sales. Not to mention 3M's business has been contracting for years, meanwhile Amazon is full speed ahead. So that gap will grow dramatically in just a few years. Amazon will hit $200 billion in sales in a few years, while 3M will have seen zero growth (Amazon will be 7x larger then).

Your comparison doesn't make much sense today. It'll make zero sense tomorrow. Samsung is the sole company in that group that will be comparable in just three or four more years.

You've only nitpicked 3M out of the group. Go look up some figures for the chaebol and the keiretsu ;)

You didn't mention other Korean companies or Japanese keiretsus. And also Mitsubishi wasn't named and is huge. Their revenue will likely dwarf Amazon for decades to come.

Your example is just 3M and is easy picking compared to any other example you could've chosen.

>Mitsubishi wasn't named and is huge. Their revenue will likely dwarf Amazon for decades to come.

Was curious, so I looked it up. Mitsubishi's revenue (as of 2011, which is where Wikipedia cuts off) was ~ $174B. Amazon's 2016 revenue was about $136B. I'm guessing Amazon has a higher revenue growth rate than Mitsubishi.

Samsung's total 2014 revenue was $305B. LG's 2012 revenue was $143B. SK's 2011 revenue was $99B. SMFG's 2011 revenue was ~28B. Toyota is the largest company in Japan at about $237B in revenue (not a keiretsu, but included for scale).

TL;DR; it's not easy to find a company (or related group) with revenue that dwarfs Amazon's. Amazon is really big.

Mitsubishi's revenue and expanse as an example is just crazy when comparing to Euro-American companies. Their revenue and major groups under the company are huge! Great example.

What people also don't seem to realize is that the US has serious anti-monopoly laws on the books (even if enforcement has been kinda lax lately). Remember Microsoft in the 90s? With Amazon running many competitors' infrastructure (e.g. Netflix is on AWS, FBA shenanigans etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if it got hit with some legal action aimed at breaking it up at this point.

Does monopoly law apply when they have healthy competitors in every sector? This has seemed to be the escape hatch for the large tech companies: go do everything, not just eat one sector.

There is still real competition in the cloud computing space, though. Plus, it's a hard sell that Amazon has done anything with AWS that is anti-consumer or monopolistic. The benefits to consumers are clear, and I don't think there's any reason for regulators to come after them right now.

One area where anti-monopoly law seems vague to me: does law clearly define what a market is?

Like, MS got hit for leveraging their 'OS market' monopoly to break into the 'browser market', even though they are both pieces of software.

If you draw distinct markets aggressively enough, then everything is its own market and many companies are monopolists in their own narrow niche.

Also, what if technological changes turn two originally separate markets into a unified entity -- should it be anticompetitive if a monopolist does that?

This wiki article does a pretty good job at explaining how the "relevant market" gets determined in competition law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_market#Definition_and...

The article lists demand-side and supply-side substitution as 2 of the 3 key factors, which basically means 'if a monopolist changes the price in this product, how much does it affect supply or demand in the other product', and then says that products at exhibit substitution are in the same markets.

The problem with these definitions as applied to the tech industry in particular is that oftentimes the 'price' the consumer pays is non-monetary.

For example, should Google's dominance in the search industry preclude it from cross-promoting its other services?

If both search and also the product it's cross-promoting are free, how should courts go about figuring out whether that's ok?

Presumably Google is getting paid in data, and is turning that data into money via Ads, but the actual accounting of how much that data is worth is only something that Google has access to -- and then to see how this works for competitors, the court would also need the proprietary internal numbers for them too.

Monopolies are ok, anti-competitive behavior from monopolists is not. I think the only thing I've seen that looks anti-competitive from Amazon is when they stopped selling (some?) TV devices without support for Amazon Prime Videos.

Maybe some people think monopolies are OK but the law says they aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original.... Are you suggesting a legalization campaign for monopolies?

I think it'd be a good idea, but let's not pretend that any of us need to push for that. The monopolies are perfectly capable of hiring their own lobbyists.

I think you are mis-interpreting the Sherman Act. Monopolies are not illegal -- from further down in the article you linked to:

The act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct, which generally consists of conspiratorial conduct of the kind forbidden by Section 1 of the Sherman Act, or Section 3 of the Clayton Act.

The FTC also has more information: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

There's nothing in the FTC link that says monopolies are not illegal. In fact they say this:

> The Sherman Act outlaws [...] any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize."

If you look at any felony e.g. selling hard drugs there are always mitigating circumstances and exceptions - but they don't invalidate the general rule. The text of section 2 is pretty clear that monopolies are generally illegal.

I'll try this again. Section II makes "monopolization" illegal, which is different than being a monopoly.

From the DOJ: Monopolization requires (1) monopoly power and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

I'll try again to restate the big picture and see where we disagree:

- monopolies are illegal since 1890

- excepting natural monopolies (utilities), which are strictly regulated instead

- since the 1980s, also excepting companies that keep prices low for the end consumer. This is the space where Walmart, Amazon and Uber have grown. But, if they try to raise prices substantially OR if enforcement guidelines become more strict again (b/c politics), these giant companies can get into giant legal trouble (see: break-up of AT&T).

Are we in disagreement an any of these points? If you think unregulated monopolies were OK before 1985, can you give any examples? Same for post-1985 unregulated monopolies that raised consumer prices?

I disagree with the very first point. Monopolies are not illegal in the United States. Monopolization is illegal, but the legal definition of monopolization is not "being a monopoly."

If it were illegal to be a monopoly, no firm could ever invent a new product category as they would be a monopoly in that market. There's a hundred years of case law supporting the fact the being a monopoly is not illegal. The US v. Grinnell is one of the big ones, and quoted in the DOJ page I linked to.

https://www.quora.com/When-and-why-were-monopolies-outlawed-...

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-oligopolies-legal-if-monopolie...

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

https://www.wired.com/2012/10/antitrust-is-supposed-to-prote...

http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/

As another example, Microsoft was found to be a monopoly and to be monopolizing. The result of the case was not that they had to stop being a monopoly, it was that they had to stop the unfair and monopolizing business practices.

> Monopolies are not illegal in the United States. Monopolization is illegal

Next up: the 18th amendment did not implement Prohibition, since it still allowed alcohol consumption; it merely forbade obtaining it.

The links present a unilateral view of the issue, mainly from lawyers defending big companies. Here's the other side from our longest serving Justice, William O. Douglas [1]:

"We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size can become a menace - both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace - because of its control of prices. [...] That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it."

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/334/495.html

How many utility companies can you get to provide electricity to your house? In the vast majority of the US it's just 1.

You are correct that natural monopolies are allowed to exist under US law, but the trade-off is that they're strictly regulated. Each state has a utilities commission, usually appointed by the governor.

Amazon has done some stuff that smells anti-competitive. For example... where did all the product listings go from this sellers profile? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/node/index.html?ie=UTF8&me=A2RFSIF...) They seem to have all disappeared the day after thanksgiving last year....

I heard through the grapevine that in the marketplace agreement, that you must list all products from all channels you have a presence in with the amazon channel to stay in compliance.

why would they do that? Oh probably because Ma Bell uses that data to target which products they want to compete in from their eCommerce company.

They've done a bunch of anti-competitive shit with ebooks, but the DOJ has adopted the really fucked-up position of "if prices are low for consumers, then it's ok", even though Amazon is clearly abusing their dominant position in the ebook market repeatedly in order to squash competition in ways that have been clearly found to be illegal in the past.

How about anti-dumping laws? How is that applied in the US?

Isn't "burning money until you kill competition" inherently illegal?

I assume Uber has the same issue.

What was the end result of the MS anti-trust stuff? Clearly they weren't broken up; did it have much of an impact on their business? I assume some fines were paid after a long appeals process?

It's hard to make a good argument that amazon is (or could be) a monopoly. It's more like google or Walmart where they're just really big and their scale makes them hard (not impossible, maybe unrewarding) to compete with.

The result of the 2007 antitrust case was that microsoft could not ship IE anymore, but instead had to offer users a dialog offering to install chrome, firefox, IE or others from 2010 on.

This was part of why Chrome quickly rose after that. The other part was that Google became anticompetitive.

Chrome didn't exist until 7 years after the case was decided and settled.

> Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google.[11] It was first released in 2008, for Microsoft Windows

> BrowserChoice.eu was a website created in March 2010 as the result of the decision in the European Union Microsoft competition case. The case involved legal proceedings by the EU against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer (IE) with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used their dominance of the operating system market to also create a dominant market position in the web browser market.

I’m confused, what are you trying to say? Chrome didn’t exist until 2017?

The case referenced by most US commenters would be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

I've never known whether European antitrust (or privacy) action against companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook has had significant global/US effect. Do you (or anyone else) know of a good source on this?

Ah okay – I’ve never heard of the US antitrust case, so I don’t know what effects it had.

Regarding effects of BrowserChoice, Opera had some statistics: https://web.archive.org/web/20111209114445/http://my.opera.c...

Mozilla also reports how much they lost due to BrowserChoice not running for a while – BrowserChoice had almost doubled their overall download rate: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-lost-6-9-million-downlo...

Yeah, Netscape was the main browser impacted by the Microsoft anti-trust case.

(The Netscape source code -- released in part because Netscape was dying --if I recall ended up forming the basis of Firefox, so it's fair to speculate "what ifs" if the Microsoft anti-trust judgement was more swift.)

How do you think google, apple and this batch of companies exists because Microsoft wasn't able to bundle its way to success in those markets.

> What people also don't seem to realize is that the US has serious anti-monopoly laws on the books

Not true. At all. We have a weak Anti-Trust law that most Justice departments are squeamish about enforcing.

The laws are very strong. Back in the day, they would block a merger if it affected 7% of a market, and vertical integration was a big no-no. None of those laws have been repealed. The enforcement guidelines were weakened during the Reagan administration (a big factor in the rise of e.g. Walmart) but they're still strong enough to block plenty of mergers and allow the occasional Sherman Act prosecution. I agree with you that it's a lack of political will, but politics has been very unpredictable lately.

A weak law is not the same as an unenforced strong law.

An unenforced strong law can become enforced essentially overnight and wipe out those violating it.

For the moment they are maintaining / gaining market share by offering a better service. As long as it will be the case I would be surprised if they run into anti-trust problems. When they start abusing of this dominant position, then troubles may come.

You forgot their own semi trucks and the Amazon Original Shows!

100%. It's also arguably the most irreplaceable. Just go through the thought exercise of imagining if a big tech company just vanished overnight. We'd all remember what they did and how the services work so companies could try to recreate the value proposition. This is how I imagine it playing out among the "Big 4."

Apple: If Apple vanished tomorrow I could get an Android phone that lacked some of the polish of iOS, but my day-to-day would be largely unchanged. Their laptops are still the best IMO, but could deal with a Lenovo if needed.

Google: Bing is fine. There are no shortage of online collaboration tools. Their dominance in AI is impressive, but it's not hard to imagine Microsoft reasserting themselves in Google's absence. Self-driving cars and life extension startups are well-capitalized. Their services are amazing, but not unique.

Facebook: Social media will find a way. If FB vaporized, something would fill the gap. Twitter would be given a new lease on life.

Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave. Who has the tech chops, willingness to deal with the grimy logistics and poor margins of retail, build out the cap ex of distribution, and deal with the politics of it all. Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech. If I had to bet on one of these four companies existing 100 years from now it would be Amazon without question.

Walmart

Walmart is going to build the largest hosting company in the world?

If you're a tech company, and your stack is so tightly coupled to Amazon that it represents an existential threat to your server fleet, you were never going to make it anyway.

Because Netflix could migrate over night, right?

Yes, they should have a contingency plan to bring things onto another hosting provider within 1 or 2 days. Anything else is negligence from a business continuity perspective for a company that size.

Companies plan for utilities to go out, which don't even have competition. It's insane to operate just hoping Amazon doesn't get hacked, freeze your account, experience a catastrophic failure, or just decide to quadruple the price overnight.

If uptime has any relevance to your company at all, have (and test!) a process to move everything to another provider in a mostly automated fashion.

Dont forget their early adoption of database technology led to their rise.

That's interesting – I actually hadn't heard that before but it makes for a notable story. Got a link?

https://www.healthcatalyst.com/wal-mart-birth-of-data-wareho...

MS already have Azure which would fill the gap I'm sure. There's also Google cloud compute.

They do not have the international scale of Amazon. Walmart is non-existent in a lot of countries.

So? It's not like there's no online retail in those countries. Amazon is fighting the good fight against local retailers which will thrive until a 'replacement' comes along. I'm pretty sure Europe will not miss Amazon that much (not as much as the USA).

I just searched for how much does Amazon sell outside of North America (which granted, includes Canada and Mexico) and it was about 40%[1].

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Amazons-revenue-com...

Wal-Mart, probably. They bought Jet.com, which is effectively Amazon retail. I've tried it and it works just fine.

Amazon's definitely the 900 lb gorilla of convenience, but the BATNA of simply not using them is not really a material concern for the normative middle-class consumer who can drive to Target.

I think you are forgetting a big one. Microsoft.

If they were to suddenly go legs up today that would have unimagionable consequences. The size of their offerings and the amount of companies using their stack is breathtaking. Sure, except for their online services the stack would still be there, but the prospects of no more security updates would cause real problems and a slow but steady meltdown.

There would be scrambling like we have never seen before in the IT world. So much scrambling.

...I don't live in the MS stack, so I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable. Shake up to businesses that rely on Windows? Sure, but honestly I don't have troubles imagining another vendor (Apple or a *nix vendor or one of the OSes that are known and beloved to only a few) stepping in - after all, there's nothing special Windows offers. Frankly, I think this would be good - businesses have long lagged behind in be able to change because they are hampered by locked-in software limitations. My current office uses Google Docs and Gmail, and I was amazed by how little that causes problems. If MS were to vanish, I foresee a period of panic and pain...but more panic than pain, and of limited duration. In particular, assuming Windows didn't vanish, everyone would have time to deal with it. Lack up feature updates, lack of keeping up with standards, lack of security updates...MS has shown in the past that these can be survived, and while recent MS behavior has been better, I don't see "unimaginable consequences". Heck, there are still people running IE6! (very few, relatively, but 0.25% market share is still a lot of people!)

Then again, I've often noticed that being in or out of the MS stack is a bubble, and the other side sees things very differently, so I could definitely be wrong here.

The only reason Amazon vanishing would be significant is because there's not really a competitor in the whole of their space. online booksellers aren't doing online non-book goods delivery aren't doing cloud services aren't doing grocery delivery, etc. Each of those services would be easily replaced, but not by a single company.

You should count yourself as lucky for not having to work in either public sector, higher ed or just plain old companies. ActiveDirectory + Windows servers disappearing overnight would pretty much send us back to the 1980s with how prevalent it is.

But the implication of the above comment was not that the programs would disappear, just the company. (I mean, any online authorizations would die, but I didn't think that was part of daily routines, just installations. Though I really know nothing of MS business-type servers (SQLServer etc))

...and I'm desperately trying to hold in comments about the small difference in performance between 1980s and MS software - I honestly blame Outlook for how the world killed email as an effective medium.

Though I do count myself lucky to have my current job. I've worked public sector in the past, and recently started up a 2nd (part time) job at a university that involves using Outlook. It is quite painful.

count yourself lucky, you could be using lotus notes

Highly prevalent != irreplaceable (though it might be a prerequisite). The fact that so many businesses/sectors use MS technology is what makes them one of the "Big 4." However, there is nothing irreplaceable about those technologies. Another vendor/technology could replace them if those businesses were forced to change due to MS disappearing.

>I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable.

Government! Government and enterprise! Neither would function without MS!!

Windows/Active Directory, Windows Server, MS SQL server, SharePoint, and Office all make the world go round in the public and private sectors. You'd have to entirely replace pretty much all corporate infrastructure.

It's not like everyone's deployments will just stop working if MS goes bellyup.

True, but given that they're moving towards 'Windows as a Service' it's not hard to imagine that happening someday.

Except for the Server OS. That's already built to be pretty standalone (aside from updates and collaborating with other Windows Servers). The idea here is that future security vulnerabilities aren't being patched which means it'd be open season for hackers once new vulns are discovered.

Sure! But not all at once (we're imagining the company goes away, not that existing software disappears, per above comments), and you didn't dispute that the products are replaceable, you just stated that they are in a LOT of use.

Coke and Pepsi together represent a huge share of the soft drinks people drink. If those two flavors, or even the two companies, disappeared, it would have a notable impact in that a lot of people would find new drinks (plus the significant impact to the supply chains, distributors, etc).

But there are absolutely competitors to fill in the gaps. There ARE other soft drinks. And if none of the existing brands are up to the challenge, in the absence of a huge established market presence, we can easily imagine new companies stepping up.

Just because MS products have a huge presence in the market doesn't mean MS products are irreplaceable.

If you're imagining the company going bankrupt but their technology still existing then Amazon wouldn't be an issue either. Someone would literally just take over their logistics supply chain and move right along. It's happened in the past, it can happen again.

I would dispute that active directory is irreplaceable. There is literally nothing on the market today that has the functionality and ease of use, and getting anything on the market today to that point would be about as easy as re-writing AD from scratch.

As I mentioned up-thread, the only thing "special" about Amazon is that there isn't a single competitor in ALL their spaces. Each space definitely has competitors that would step up.

My experiences with AD are anything other than "ease of use", but again, I tend to live outside the MS stack, and it's been 15 or so years since I did anything remotely related (I did a lot of interaction with some LDAP servers, but only interact with AD as an end-user...where I have weird issues like "must authenticate with a userId@domain that is not my actual email address at that domain" or "Have to look up everyone by last name, even though we have 50 Agrawals but only one Preetha" or "can't get a frigging email address without navigating into contact details, and that won't even work if it's a forward email from someone outside" (though that might be Outlook). Voicing these complaints gets me "oh, you just don't have a good administrator", but...just about every place I've been has had these issues, so either AD isn't that easy to use or everything else is REALLY bad.

I'm also uncertain what functionality AD has that isn't specific to integrating with the MS Stack, but that's a literal lack of knowledge, not a criticism.

Amazon doesn't have any competitors? They are literally Walmart or Target + leasing access to their IT infrastructure. Name one thing that isn't AWS that doesn't overlap with Target/Walmart. And AWS literally maps to Walmart IT and Target IT, they just aren't interested in competing in that space (and rightly so).

As for AD: An email address isn't an identity. I'm not sure why you would expect the two to match. I don't login to my mac with tw04@gmail.com, I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with tw04@mydomain.com either.

The searching I can only surmise you were doing it wrong? I've never had an issue searching by first or last name in any tool whether it be the AD tools themselves or Outlook.

AD is a directory server, it can service a Windows environment or a Mac environment or a Linux environment. They've got a complete implementation of LDAP if you choose not to use AD auth on the client side. That being said: EVERYONE integrates with AD. Very few people integrate with anything else. I like having unified auth in my environment, perhaps you enjoy managing local hosts but that sounds disgusting to me.

If MS disappeared you would have billions of computers running an unsupported OS, running software that won't run elsewhere.

That all has to be replaced. That's billions upon billions in lost productivity.

> That all has to be replaced.

Yup...over time, just like it is ALREADY replaced over time. But let's assume I accept everything you stated without quibble.

I feel like we've lost the point of this thread. Yes, ANY large company vanishing would have a large impact. The more widespread the current influence of that company, the larger the impact.

But we weren't discussing "does MS qualify as a company with widespread influence". We weren't saying "I bet I can name a large company that could vanish without notable impact". Someone made the assertion that Amazon is somewhat unique in the results of theoretical vanishing. Even if Amazon ISN'T unique in this regard, the consequences of Amazon vanishing and MS vanishing are very, very different.

Um migrating from coke to Dr pepper doesn't cost anything.

Windows/Active Directory -- FreeIPA, Samba

Windows Server -- RHEL

MS SQL server -- PostgreSQL

SharePoint -- let it die, useless

Office -- LibreOffice, Google Apps

Um I never claimed there was no alternatives, I said that they were completely and totally ubiquitous in government and enterprise.

If MS stopped supporting their products it would be literally billions of collective dollars to migrate to alternatives.

I've been doing this a long time and in my personal observations I've noticed my corporate and (especially) government customers have been moving more into the Microsoft ecosystem than 10 years ago. MS is more important than they've ever been, if you can believe it.

There are many companies built on a .NET stack. They will all have a terrible time if Microsoft vanishes. Most will probably vanish with Microsoft.

With any sense, those companies would band together and invest in expanding .NET core into doing what they need.

These companies have no interest in getting into that business. That's why they pay microsoft large sums of money to do it for them.

Yeah, but we're talking about a doomsday scenario when Microsoft disappears overnight. They'd rather invest in a new .NET than have to rewrite their entire stack.

Depends on if Xamarin emerges from the ashes or if they disappear along with the rest of Microsoft.

I'm almost linux-only, but I have to agree on that. Microsoft offerings look to me much more difficult to replace than Amazon's.

Do LinkedIn and Skype also disappear? Nokia? Mojang?

Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

I already use Netflix for my video streaming. Spongebob is on Amazon Prime, so I watch that. I use YouTube, XBOX, and Google Play for other stuff (other videos, some movie rentals, games, music).

I use OneDrive for storing files on a company's servers. Works great.

I normally just get books from a bookstore or library. Tried a Kindle, didn't care much for it. Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

I don't really do food delivery, though I game the coupon system a bit with Blue Apron from time-to-time, since they keep sending me $30 off a delivery when I cancel. I mainly just go to the grocery store.

Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

> I normally just get books from a bookstore or library

Wow. Where do you live? I can't imagine being able to find 1/2 of the books I buy in any of the bookstores in San Francisco, for example.

otoh most "books" I buy these days are actually Kindle downloads, or on O'Reilly Safari.

There's plenty of other online retailers for physical books. Literally every book you can buy at Amazon you should be able to find somewhere else. And for digital books, there's other vendors there too (such as iBooks).

I avoid Amazon. I buy my books elsewhere and nothing Amazon has that I need can't be sourced somewhere else.

Name a single book you can buy on Amazon and not somewhere else.

You must have not looked elsewhere, I bought a whole series of decades out of print books and didn't touch Amazon.

> Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

Sort of. If you are only ever using the basics such as EC2 and S3, then it is relatively easy to migrate. Use more services and it becomes a nightmare.

Heck, even with just EC2 it is already non trivial, think about a huge server deployment with a myriad of security groups and subnets that were fine tuned for years.

Indeed, AWS is still king. I doubt GCP or Azure would have anywhere near the capacity to handle all of the AWS customers. You're talking orders of magnitude, maybe 1000x? more compute power required - it's a different scale.

Judging by the Hacker News comments, it's google that has more capabilities than AWS.

If you follow comments about both, there are recurring ones of people who order 5000-15000 cores on Google for short computing intensive tasks whereas AWS didn't let them have thousandS. That forced them to switch.

I find that hard to believe.... 15000 cores is only 1000 16 core serversand my company has no problem with allocating those (300 per AZ) on a monthly basis, using them for a couple days and returning them.

Sometimes I worry; I can't figure out how jet.com makes money shipping me 100 pounds of cat litter for no additional charge. I would think that the cost of shipping would be higher than what I paid for the litter.

gasoline is very very underpriced this days, it cant last,

> I already use Netflix for my video streaming.

To be fair, though, if AWS were to disappear your Netflix wouldn't work anymore. And given that it took them seven years [1] to move to AWS, I guess it would take them quite a while to move to Azure or Google or their own hardware.

For the logistics / shopping part I agree, though: I live in Switzerland, where Amazon doesn't ship much except for books and I have to say I don't feel I'm missing much. In fact, many local online stores which could develop because they weren't drowned by Amazon work better IMHO and at similar prices than the Amazon website.

[1]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

I seriously doubt Netflix wouldn't find some way to rapidly move to some alternative if AWS were to disappear. But by all means correct me if I'm wrong!

Agreed. If they go as far as randomly disabling AWS nodes to test their own resilience I'd be shocked if they didn't have some sort of contingency for if AWS went completely belly-up. Who knows, they could even have Azure nodes on standby in case AWS in its entirety went down?

Everyone should have a cloud provider total-outtage strategy. You should atleast control the ability to move DNS if everything in said cloud provider is out.

You seriously think there is a provider somewhere sitting on 20 empty datacenters with all the hardware procured and hooked up just waiting on an off chance Netflix might switch?

I don't think the AWS datacenters would disappear in thin air either.

Well neither would warehouses and other infrastructure they built but that was not the premise that is being discussed.

You realize most of Netflix is not in AWS right?

You realize that netflix is using up over 20% of aws capacity and as cool as having your own cdn is there is not much purpose in it without the part that runs on AWS.

The part that runs in AWS could just as easily run on bare metal. Stack Overflow does it, Backblaze does it, Github does it; I'm so disappointed in this tired trite that your a special snowflake running in AWS.

Yes it would run even better but it would take a few years to do the buildout.

Nothing is going disappear overnight.. AWS iaas services are commodity and not something so unique that are not replaceable with products from other cloud vendors

At Netflix scale they are not replaceable by other vendors because other vendors do not have enough capacity to accommodate Netflix migration.

Can you provide information as to how much capacity Netflix would need to migrate? Otherwise, this comment has no basis in reality.

there are estimates that netflix is consuming about 20% of AWS. AWS does not publish a list of DCs but from regions and AZs you can put a lower bound estimate at 40 so it would be anywhere from 8 DCs to whatever the upper bound is (I guesstimated 20)

Well, your question is not uncommon for people having little experiences developing and operating large distributed systems.

But I can guarantee you, if Netflix can, they already did, so to make them in a position better negotiate price with AWS.

Whatever mysterious force wipes all trace of Amazon from the earth might help Netflix find someone to run some servers.

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

I'm an avid reader, and I'd be seriously inconvenienced without Amazon. Selling books has become only a small part of what they do, but it's still the part I care most about.

Books are pretty much a commodity item there's plenty of places to buy books online and in person that aren't Amazon. There's nothing special about Amazon's books.

I've used Jet and it's OK. The thing with Amazon is the 5% cash-back credit card you should be using with it, the ridiculous free shipping (seriously, I have no clue how they actually make money sending me a large box with $40 worth of stuff in it same-day), and the seriously easy returns or refunds if you need it.

One of the things about Amazon - they really don't make money. Actually, they are profitable, but only microscopically. All of that great stuff that we get shipped for free with 5% back costs a lot of money. The business model is to crush the competition then profit.

Worth reading about whether or not Amazon makes money:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/8/8/amazons-profits

>Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

This is an US centric view. There are very few services that ship worldwide, with such a large selection as Amazon, at more than reasonable prices, with two day delivery. Amazon is almost irreplaceable because they are the only ones that do it at such a scale. Aside from alibaba, but that means you are ordering in bulk.

Amazon is perfectly replaceable by the hundred of respective national competitors.

People might have switched to Amazon for price and/or convenience, they didn't forget the local past brand that served them for decade. In some places and some markets, Amazon is not even the leader.

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> which appeals to me

I think I can tell exactly what kind of person you are...

>Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP,

I started using just S3 in 2007, but fully moved my hosting on AWS by 2010. And never looked back. Their offering is the most mature, compared to competitors. And continuously improves, Few (random) examples:

1) They allow HTTPs breaking at the load balancer level, along with certificates you can just generate on the fly and use. Its so freakin' easy, you wouldn't believe, in comparison to, the process, if it was not there.

2) They keep on reducing prices on their own. As a customer you can't but feel glad when that happens.

3) Their DNS service (Route 53) is the easiest to configure I have seen. Having ran my own DNS, before it was released.

On top of that, there is a learning curve for any cloud. Which is as cumbersome as learning a new OS. Just like you will have to learn at least 10/20 commands before you can be productive on a new OS, same it is for cloud. E.g. How to build an image; how to spawn an instance; how to backup to S3; how to mount a volume; and so on...

Also the range and variety of instance types which you could get (memory intensive, compute intensive, from ultra small to the nxlarge ones)

There are also other reasons: Example, I tried to explore Google cloud, when it came out, but the sandbox model was not for me. So couldn't use it. I totally believe that its got better. But just my experience with it.

>but I'm not familiar enough with it.

You said it. If someone doesn't use mails, may equate gmail with Yahoo! mail or with Hotmail. Devil lies in the details.

edit: minor rephrase

Walmart would replace Amazon. Not over night, but I'd say less than 5 years to fill the online void.

Amazon being irreplaceable is not something I can agree at all with, living in Europe. I bought a book or few here and there and that's about it. AWS can be replaced, and is all the time. That's about it. Now, Ebay and paypal on the other hand...

Also, Google is more Gmail and youtube to me than google.com. How are you going to replace that easily? Especially youtube with so much content now.

twitch would replace youtube. bing for search.

How would you replace youtube without its content though? That's where it's at.

People would port stuff over.

My bet would be on vimeo, not twitch.

Vimeo is amazing when their player doesn't suck.

Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave

Absolutely true. Only some weird merger of Microsoft/Walmart/FedEx can perhaps replace Amazon. In my head, Amazon will be the first trillion $ company.

Yeah when I think about it, Amazon is only going to get bigger. Even Twitch, I think, is only scratching the surface of what it will become.

Why the said companies need to merge at all? Why not obtain specific services from all three separately?

Agreed. There is no need to merge. I was just making a counter point from an entity/conglomerate perspective.

> Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave.

Well then there's the Chinese version.

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/alibaba-already-bigger-faceboo...

I guess the UK is such a compact market that most ecommerce plays are easier compared with larger markets so Amazon's "USP" is simplicity rather than uniqueness. I could get a decent number of products from Argos the same day, my food (/homewares) delivered in a 2 hour window the next day from any number of suppliers (and if rumours are true that the aforementioned Argos might merge with a supermarket, challenger right there).

Their main benefit is in selection, price (that isn't quite as dominant in some things as it was - although it's potentially going to destroy their competitors before they themselves match Amazon) and having a slick checkout process with all of my info in there.

Obviously this is why they're focusing on own-brand, specialised products and selling infra, but then do we see a day where Amazon has its fingers in so many pies in such a big way that they have to be broken up?

Uh, what? Amazon is competing with retailers, so if Amazon goes away you'd buy from other retailers. In a big city get your books and music from local independent booksellers and record stores (in the country or for esoteric things you get them from alibris and discogs). Electronics you can get from Best Buy, Target, Wal Mart, Newegg. Or you can go to a secondary market for all the things, a little company called "eBay".

Why do I know this? Because I don't use Amazon anymore at all for anything after they blatantly screwed me over as a seller.

Sometimes I feel like engineers on HN have centralization on the brain. We are so impressed with scale and complexity of Amazon! We forget this size and complexity arose because it's trying to compete with (and presumably supplant) an enormous, biologically evolved distribution and retail ecosystem.

If Amazon dies, we all simply go back to that ecosystem, like I did, both online and real life. (And you know what? It's better. Newegg is better for electronics because they only do electronics, and they fight patent trolls; Alibris is better because they have a better selection, better prices, and support local business; Discogs is better for the same reason; all are better because they are focused.)

" In a big city get your books and music from local independent booksellers and record stores"

Except in many cities, many of those went out of business in large part because of Amazon. Amazon is still often more competitive compared with those that remain, from a price/shipping perspective.

That's a vague claim, but such as it is, it rings hollow. Actually, it sounds like a rationalization for using Amazon (which is easy) instead of looking around for a local alternative, and going there (which is hard). I've recently travelled fairly extensively through the US and every city of any size I visited still has a handful of independents, and they are doing okay, if not great.

The next time you want an album, instead of opening up iTunes or Amazon, I suggest opening up google maps and typing in "record store", and then going there.

> I suggest opening up google maps and typing in

Why use an online service like that when there are perfectly good printed maps out there? Mate that up with a printed yellow pages and you're all set.

That is unfair and hurtful, Chris. I'm encouraging people to support local business, not because I'm a luddite but because I don't want to see local business starved to death by global megacorps. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm pointing out a harder option, and in good faith. I'd appreciate it if you'd be open and clear about any objections you might have to this, rather than resort to sarcasm and innuendo. Thanks.

Looking back you are right: I'm sorry. I was initially amused at the use of one technology over the other as being okay but I see your point. Thanks for responding and setting me straight that the reasons for doing so are important.

Excellent comment! I disagree about one thing though: I think, at least here in Holland, Google would be missed quite a bit more than Amazon. I don't know anyone who uses Amazon, so them disappearing wouldn't have too much of an effect on my world.

Google, on the other hand, is a crucial part of the lives of many people around me. Almost everyone I know uses Gmail, and Google Docs (spreadsheets, etc.) are not only used all over the place by various people collaborating, but often crucial parts of the infrastructure of many of their business. Everyone I know who has tried other search engines keeps coming back to google, about half of my friends are on Android phones and use google calendar and their assistant.

Basically, Google seems to have multiple tentacles into each and everyone I know. Amazon, in contrast, is a 'web shop' that most of the people I know don't even use because there are local, more popular alternatives (Bol.com, for one).

I suspect if Amazon went under, the businesses relying on their cloud services would panic, but just move to another service. Google, on the other hand, would be sorely missed by tons of people in tons of small and big ways.

I used to live in Europe and would agree with you 100%, but now living in the Bay area Amazon is a key part of life almost. I have tried to stop using them a few times but it is just ridiculously convenient and cheap. Order something and have the almost always cheapest option on the door today or tomorrow.

Another reason for this is that going to stores is a serious hassle here. When I was living in London and even NYC I just walked to the stores instead, but in gridlocked suburbia that is almost not an option.

My personnal experience mirrors your for the first three points but I wouldn't miss amazon because I only ordered twice from them. Which goes to show that any of these points could be irreplaceable - or not - for anybody.

I agree with you final stance though, that Amazon is highly likely to be still around in 100 years unless they are back to square one with everyone else if an energy crisis (oil, transport, etc.) crushes us all.

If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, my work as an ops person will become a joy. I truly cannot imagine any other vendor being this shitty and in business. Home life is already a joy (and a lot less expensive / cluttered) because that relationship has already been severed. I can't think of a tech company I'd miss less. Not to mention how good it'd be for competition and quality in the retail and especially in the cloud computing business.

Wait, so you are saying that having the most innovative competitor (in the retail space) would be good for competition? Maybe for THE competition, but surely not the consumer.

I'm definitely NOT talking about the most innovative competitor in the retail space because I'm talking about Amazon. What I'm saying is that if Amazon disappeared, the retail space would be more competitive. I highly doubt that is at all controversial.

> I truly cannot imagine any other vendor being this shitty and in business.

I see you haven't used Softlayer

It's not only about the services these companies provide but the data that they currently hold. I would hate to loose all my Google docs overnight or all my Facebook photos. Sure, you can regularly back things up, but there's no guarantee that importing those backups on the replacement service will be painless.

> Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech.

100%, yes. Totally agree! And it is probably a very non-ideal situation to be in from the customer POV. For example, Amazon ate up the .book TLD away from consumers and very few eyebrows were raised. Their strength and position in business is an impressive thing to talk about until someone at the top decides to flip the switch. ;)

> Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech.

I disagree, Amazon is the only big player which have yet to master the international market. I live in Europe and there are plenty of small players here which offers similar or better deals with faster shipping so most don't even bother with Amazon. Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are as dominant as everywhere else though.

Amazon can't even master localizing to their nearest neighbour in Canada. Amazon music and video are still not here, over 10 years after the rolled out in the US. Their online shopping offerings are not as in depth here. Their Canadian presence is an after thought, and is arguably one of the easiest localization efforts to undergo.

Compare this to Apple who, when they decided to bring iTunes outside of the US launched it almost simultaneously across a huge number of locales.

IMHO Amazon is already losing ground in areas it has only recently tried to stick its nose into. And its online marketplace has started to suck, started to fill with dubious merchants with prices all over the map.

I agree that Amazon in Canada is not as good as in the US but we do have prime video now (primevideo.com) and, at least in Vancouver we now have 1 day shipping which is amazing.

Meh, I know I am anecdata, but I don't use them that much, maybe once every 6 months for a book or something. I know some people use them every day, but I just don't and don't really ever see myself doing so. I mean, it just isn't hard at all to pick up the stuff I need/want from the store on the way home*

*Caveat: I live in the suburbs of a larger-ish city, not in the rural areas of the world.

>Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave...

My local grocery and book stores?..

Some another cloud provider for hosting?..

It'll be very hard to replace the _combination_ of services Amazon provides. The separate services by themselves are hardly unique.

while it cannot completely fill the space, people never take ebay seriously. the amount of stuff I can buy there shipped free or just in total cheaper than Amazon makes it worth my time to cross shop.

what keeps me off other 'retailer' sites is merely how badly some are implemented, from clutter to just outright being buried under items that are listed but you cannot get in your area.

>"Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave"

So you would make do with substitutes to deal with Apple, Google and Facebook disappearing but if Amazon disappeared you can't imagine yourself or others walking into a store to buy goods?

Well, part of the reason I use Amazon is how little free time I have.

Amazon has lots of stuff that I either can't find elsewhere or don't have the time to go and purchase in-person.

> 100%. It's also arguably the most irreplaceable.

As an Australian who doesn't have access to Amazon, it's easy to imagine Amazon being replaced.

You're really underestimating the power of markets if you think any company is irreplaceable. Copying/replicating is a lot easier than doing something for the first time.

Alternatives outside the US / Euro centric HN perspective: Alibaba et al.

Amazon: Alibaba/taobao

Do you own any Amazon stock after having worked there for that period of time? I'm not a finance guy, at all, but that's the one company I've always considered putting a couple bills into and root for.

Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K...

> Do you own any Amazon stock after having worked there for that period of time

Amazon pays SDEs about 1/4 of their income in the form of RSUs, vesting twice a year. I joined at $187, and sold my shares over time to cover various expenses (wedding, house downpayment, sold the last ones for an upcoming kitchen renovation).

> Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K

Here's the thing... when you buy and sell stocks directly, you are implicitly competing with professionals at the game of 'what is the stock actually worth?'. The professionals you play against do nothing all day but analyze the stocks they've made bets on, build models, look at data, read reports. You might beat them by luck in the short term, but they'll beat you in the long-term at this game. You're both gambling, but they know the true odds better than you do.

My recommendation: Use a robo-advisor to spread your money over a diverse set of ETFs and auto-rebalance them. My friends are early employees over at WealthSimple (google them), a start-up that does this. Or read what it is their robo-advisor does, and do that yourself to save the 0.5% fee.

0.50% (50 bps) is excessive.

If you don't want to do yourself but still want the benefits of rebalancing (and tax-loss harvesting), suggest checking out Wealthfront (https://www.wealthfront.com/) instead.

It's high for America, low for Canada. Afaik, WealthFront haven't opened a Canadian arm yet, while Simple are based here.

Didn't see this over the weekend, I wish I had. I did look into some different investing tools a couple months ago, but got intimidated by them, especially the ones that round up your purchases as you have to give them access to your checking. I really just wanted to get my feet wet with something smart and small at first. I'm not wealthy, but given the chance to learn I feel that I could be successful at it. I'll give your recommendation a chance.

This was not mentioned in the article, but I'd say this puts Amazon at the forefront of the issue of the disappearing "good job" in America ... as you mention, Amazon prefers contractors over employees.

Maybe for "unskilled labor" but I don't believe that to be true for engineering talent?

Compare that to Berkshire Hathaway rather than to GOOG/FB and it's not quite as impressive.

Interesting points and Amazon is a great company not disputing that but the older I get the less I want. My spending on Amazon has fallen over the last 18 years to so little I am thinking about dropping Prime.

AWS is in a competitive market with Google, MS, etc.

Logistics are more self serving for Amazon in my opinion. I'm under the impression their planes are used to move fright between US Hubs and maybe to bring higher dollar freight from China instead of 2 weeks on the water. Walmart already leases (and has for years) it's own container ship. It's on a 1 month month cycle out of China. Container ships typically sail out every Friday night out of China. Spend two weeks loading and 12 days on the water to US and Canadian ports. So Walmart still uses others to ship freight. The last mile for delivery is also competitive, USPS, UPS, FEDEX, DHL, etc, aren't going to sit still. Trucking is incredibly competitive industry. Most fright moves by rail coast to coast with trucks picking up at regional terminals. There is still a lot of long haul but it's more expensive. A full 52ft trailer from NY to TX can run around $1700, it's the LTL where most Truckers make their money. I was under the impression that Amazon leased trailers and didn't lease any tractors. Giving private operators contracts to haul.

No cash register stores might be a hit with some folks but price is really important to a lot of America if you have a family. I also wonder if RFID ink could be used for bar codes where you just push your cart through a reader portal and it scans the whole cart at once. No lines and seconds to check out with just the bagging to do.

I appreciate what Amazon has done. They basically made anyone they compete with become more efficient. Quite the driving force and fantastic for the consumer. Lets hope they continue.

You say it in a tongue and cheek manner but I feel letting corporations getting this big is quite dangerous and will be the death of democracy.

>"I've said before on hackernews, but people never seem to grasp the scope of Amazon. They aren't an e-commerce website anymore; that's just the tip of the iceberg"

I don't think this is some kind of special perspective that you have from working there. I think people seem to grasp their ambitions pretty well. Their fleet of planes, the delivery drones for last mile, Alexa, Prime Pantry, AWS etc, all of these developments have received good coverage in mainstream media.

My vote would've been "US Robotics" from "I, Robot". They have arguably the best virtual assistant on the market, Alexa. Paired with their expertise in automation, I'm imagining a future where Amazon robots would do the vacuuming, wash dishes, and do my laundry. (And of course order more cleaning supplies from Amazon, when I get low.)

Amazon needs to solve the counterfeit goods and scammer seller problems it has. I reported a scammer on Wednesday and in the span of time I was in the chat with them, 3 more scammers appeared for that same SKU.

I've been a customer since the late 90s and if they don't get this fixed, I'm going to start looking for another e-tailer to use.

Not that AliExpress is much better with counterfeit, but it is the "fresh" contender to the West. There might be a movement away from Amazon's core business as AliExpress / Ali* expand here.

I doubt it... most of the counterfeit junk on Amazon is just Ali products and sellers leaking over.

Yeah, but at higher prices. You might as well just buy straight from the source on Ali and skip Amazon altogether.

That is not a great solution for consumers. People don't want cheaper counterfeits - they want the real thing. Ali doesn't do this better than Amazon.

I think you're missing the point. The point is you're going to get crappy counterfeits on Amazon, so it's better to just buy them on Ali where you'll get them cheaper.

If you want the real thing, don't buy on Amazon.

In fact, Ali does let you choose the seller of the item, and lets you contact him as much as you want before the transaction. So, no, Ali does this better than Amazon.

Well yeah... if I wanted to buy cheap counterfeits; most of the time I don't.

Then Amazon probably isn't a good place for you to shop.

At their scale, I wonder what would be involved?

Let companies claim an SKU via a verification process, maybe? Let me pick whether I buy from the "owner" of that SKU - never commingled stock - or if I want to take a chance on the commingled unverified vendors.

a) When co-mingling inventory, keep track of the original source, and penalize them (not the seller) for product issues, bad product reviews, etc. Or stop co-mingling if you can't have accountability.

b) Separate somehow bad reviews and complaints about SELLERS from bad reviews, complaints about PRODUCTS. Again, more direct accountabilithy.

Today, when you leave a bad review or complain about crap counterfeits or bad service, shipping, etc, it just doesn't affect the actual bad actor in the way it should.

Both of these are already done. Complaints about commingled inventory will hurt the one who sent them in. You can review the seller and the product separately.

Not sure I agree. If I get a counterfeit product as a customer, I am guaranteed to leave a bad review. I don't see some process in place that automatically routes that from a PRODUCT review into a WHOEVER_ACTUALLY_PUT_THAT_IN_THE INVENTORY review.

I can't even really tell Amazon that the product is counterfeit. The closest thing is "not as described".

If you leave that review, it will go back and hurt the seller. I've seen advice in some of the groups I'm in for sellers that says if a listing gets shut down, look at recent reviews to determine if anyone was unhappy. Also, if you return and mention the word counterfeit, that will be picked up. I've had one listing temporarily shut down because of a return that said they were worried it was counterfeit, then I sent amazon invoices and they let me sell again.

You aren't addressing the two issues.

You can review a product (that has multiple sellers) without reviewing the seller. So, if I get a counterfeit, and place a PRODUCT review, it hurts ALL the sellers. Not just the single seller that did the wrong thing.

Your story didn't include the nuance of co-mingled inventory. What if the sale went to you, but was fulfilled by inventory from another seller...and the item actually was counterfeit. Does the actual culprit suffer?

I mentioned above that amazon tracks it. See https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

>Even though inventory tracked using the manufacturer barcode is commingled within the network, the source of the inventory is tracked by our fulfillment systems and is taken into consideration if inventory problems arise.

Reconcile that with "stickerless commingled inventory". How would they possibly track it? They are, at best, stretching the truth.

Note that in areas where it exposes them to liability (movies), they won't allow stickerless. That tells you something about "tracking the source".

Edit: If the bins are such a good idea why are stickers sometimes required? Also if finding the sources is so easy why do sellers selling counterfeit goods stay in the system for so long?

Commingled doesn't mean they're in the same bin, it just means that they can be used to fulfil other sellers' sales.

I have inventory with no sticker on it in NY, you have inventory with no sticker in CA. Someone orders from me, they live in CA, amazon takes yours off the shelf and sends it to them. Amazon still knows that that sale was fulfilled from your inventory.

Same thing with multiple bins in the same warehouse. I'm told by people who've toured warehouses that bins are kept separate and everything is tracked.

> If the bins are such a good idea why are stickers sometimes required?

It's not hard to see why items that expire, and some of the other excluded items might cause issues if commingled.

> Also if finding the sources is so easy why do sellers selling counterfeit goods stay in the system for so long?

Have any sources on that? Sellers are suspended quite often.

>Have any sources on that? Sellers are suspended quite often.

Sources that Amazon has gotten worse in this area over time? Sure. My own experiences, experiences of others that you can read here and elsewhere. Plenty of news stories from reputable sources (https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+counterfeit+problems&...)

All anecdotal, of course, because only Amazon really knows the numbers, and they aren't sharing. Fair enough to say I'm guessing as to why. I don't find it unreasonable to question their practices though. It's a big enough issue that people are noticing.

Not true. Commingled inventory does not get a unique barcode for each seller, it just uses the default UPC. So there's no way for Amazon to even tell who sent it. This is why many sellers avoid commingled inventory altogether, because you end up selling something that's counterfeit and getting a hit to your account when you didn't even send it to Amazon. Over time, I think this probably means that commingled is really becoming a market for lemons, with counterfeits making up a higher and higher percentage.

Source: very casual FBA seller

Your house/apartment doesn't have a UPC on it either, but nobody's confusing it with mine. Location matters.

Amazon keeps different sellers inventory in different bins, which are tracked.

I agree that some sellers are avoiding it, but I know several big sellers that are all commingled.

Most of my business was merchant fulfilled, but I still sold over six figures worth FBA last year. Never had an issue from commingled.

Commingling is an odd term to use for items kept in separate bins where there is accurate tracking as to which bin it came from. Commingled and separate? Heh.

If it's very accurate, and keeps things separated, you have to wonder why Amazon offers "Stickerless Commingling" and "Stickered Commingling". What does the sticker add if the bin system is working so well?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

That may be why they stopped calling the option commingled. They still use the word, but the option is just called "manufacturer barcode". It used to be called stickerless commingled inventory.

There's no stickered commingled option. There's stickerless commingled and stickered separate inventory.

One reason amazon keeps the stickered option is because some people might want to be able to get the exact inventory they send in back. And some items don't make sense to be commingled, like used items, items with experation dates, etc.

Hmm. They also don't allow commingled for DVD, Blueray, etc. That sort of feels like a nod to the sticker tracking being more accurate, since those are highly lucrative to counterfeit. Maybe for returns though?

I think they won't accept it for any category that requires approval.

This. They've already lost my family as customers because it's just too hard to figure out what is safe to order. Maybe few people will react the same way we have -- Amazon better hope so, or get their act together quickly.

For me, this problem went away when I started dealing exclusively with items "shipped from and sold by" amazon.com.

Do you still experience counterfeit stuff if you do that? Hopefully not, or I'll have to revise my strategy.

I love Amazon, but the ebay side of their retail business is total shady junk

>Do you still experience counterfeit stuff if you do that? Hopefully not, or I'll have to revise my strategy.

Yes, you do. There was a post just a few days ago on Hacker News about "sold and shipped by Amazon" sending out cheap counterfeits of his book.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch....

I suspect the counterfeit problem is much larger than the public can even see, most counterfeit complaints are handled by Amazon or not noticed by the consumer so they aren't made public.

My understanding is that in some cases, Amazon will blend together FBO items in their warehouse, mixing the stock that Amazon sells with the stock that other vendors send it to be sold. They're assuming that for a new book, the items are fungible, so it doesn't matter. This breaks when scammers print lower-quality counterfeit copies that appear identical at first glance. You order "Sold by Amazon.com", but when they grab one off of the shelf, you get the copy that "123Books" added there.

I've been seeing some items that are ONLY sold by 3rd party sellers. For example, go search on Amazon for Nintendo Switch. I get it, there isn't much stock out there.. but on Amazon there is no way to say, "Pre-order for whenever you get more in stock."

Instead you're forced to buy from 3rd party sellers. Now go and look at some of those sellers. There are tons and tons of sellers who have either 0% positive feedback, or they just started and have no feedback.

I'm worried that more items are going over to this Ebay-like model of shady sellers.

Amazon has gotten so bad about this stuff that I consider those "shady sellers" on Ebay to be a better bet than the ones on Amazon.

At least on Ebay, I can tell right away if a seller is shipping from China. I can't see that on Amazon until I go to the checkout, and see that it'll take several weeks to arrive.

I goto aliexpress I paid $9.70 for a 1m micro usb cable. oh, wait that was 10 of them. versus $2.86 for one on ebay or 4.99 on amazon. versus $10 at the store.

not affiliate with them, but if your going to by cheap shit from china why not go direct and get it the cheapest.

Plus, when you go to look at reviews on Aliexpress you know they're from people who bought from the seller you're buying from, not some unrelated supplier whose genuine listing a scammer has subsequently latched onto.

Ebay is pretty good, just use the Spamhaus tools to check out all negative and neutral reviews and look for weird stuff.

Ebay has a lot of experienced sellers with hundreds/thousands of transactions and only a few neutral/negative reviews a year.

Amazon may want this outcome where shoddy goods and services are hawked by their independent sellers, or is at the very least not strongly incentivized to truly fix the situation. This may be a clever strategy by Amazon to take over distribution channels that are currently dominated by the independent sellers, and achieve what is currently considered nigh-impossible: put the Internet-based disintermediation of retailing back into the genie bottle.

As the independent sellers proliferate shoddy goods and customer service, they drive increasingly more customers to "Authentic Amazon" goods and services. The "Authentic Amazon" experience doesn't have to be flawless or even exceptionally good on an absolute basis, they only need to be substantively good-enough than the aggregate of independent sellers to ascend to the top of the customer experience pyramid. That is an extremely low bar of performance I've no doubt they will accomplish, with or without a conscious strategy in place.

Thus is the stage set for independent sellers to turn into an undifferentiated mass of independent contractors vying for "shelf space" on an "Authentic Amazon" selling channel. With enough critical mass of customers dissatisfied with independent sellers, a single toggle switch or a "channel selector" screens out all of them, and suddenly they are Uber'ized: beholden to inflexible performance metrics that raise the bar on quality, with Amazon taking a very substantial cut of the action.

In the pell-mell rush to the disintermediated e-tailing golden nirvana, people forgot one of the factors retailing arose in the first place: with discerning, effective, "good" retailers, customers outsource the curating process' cognitive load (and time) to some-trusted-one else. That filtering function has eroded significantly in more modern times, but a tattered version still exists under the guise of "curation" these days. Review systems were supposed to supplant this function, but currently they are botted to irrelevance.

There are some expensive ways to reform review systems, but like I mentioned in the beginning, enhancing the independent selling channels' trustworthiness (with effective review systems or any other factors) is not in Amazon's most profitable long-term interests. I expect Amazon to get the sellers hooked into Amazon, then farm them so Amazon doesn't do as much of the legwork of curating for quality as they do today.

Bah. I've already stopped buying a ton of stuff from them, and for small cheap stuff my first stop is Ebay. I consider Ebay sellers far more reputable than Amazon ones (I know, that sounds bad, but that's how bad Amazon is). On Ebay, I can tell immediately if a seller is in China for instance. I can also easily see their feedback rating and read peoples' complaints. Amazon seems to make this stuff very hard to find. And Amazon's prices aren't all that great these days either. Finally, I got sick of being hounded to buy Amazon Prime ages ago.

Amazon has generic listings for everything so its hard to tell exactly what you're getting and from who. And since sellers share the same listing you can't apply any real filters to try to weed out the sketchy sellers other than "too cheap." Someone who isn't trying to be obvious about it would be selling at a higher price point. I don't really have a problem finding legit sellers on eBay whereas Amazon is basically a crapshoot.

I actually ordered a book from Amazon listed as "new." I got a tracking number from USPS shipped from Maryland or whatever. Book comes FedEx from India!! Yes, seller is buying fraudulent shipping to make it look like their books are shipping from the US!!! Worse, the book was in garbage condition. I mean really worn, ripped cover and all. Had to get a refund from Amazon. When I reported the seller to Amazon no action was taken that I could see, if it was up to me blatant fraud like that would be a auto-ban. I left a review warning other users of the sellers practices and the seller actually tried to convince me they weren't actually listing fraudulent tracking numbers with "we used to ship USPS but we had problems with packages getting stolen." Which makes no fucking sense at all.

Additionally, even worse (if this could get worse), I now believe that book to be a counterfeit/unauthorized printing. I didn't know that was a actually a thing until this week, but the book's quality and price-point is a huge indication. I thought the price point went down due to used books in the market and the book was just not great. I just Googled and counterfeits of this book are common and mine matches the description of the counterfeit version. :-/

I've heard horror stories about sellers who create a detailed listing for a product and a second seller comes along and changes the listing making seller 1 sell products not as described in the listing. I don't know if its true, but people claimed it happened to them.

>Amazon has generic listings for everything so its hard to tell exactly what you're getting and from who. And since sellers share the same listing you can't apply any real filters to try to weed out the sketchy sellers. I don't really have a problem finding legit sellers on eBay whereas Amazon is basically a crapshoot.

Exactly!!! The legit stuff on Ebay won't be that cheap, but it is easy to find it, and distinguish it from the scammers and the Chinese counterfeits.

> I got a tracking number from USPS shipped from Maryland or whatever.

So... what arrived from Maryland? Was it just an empty box? Or is there a way to fake a tracking number without an associated package?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing was shipped. No package. They bought shipping and paid USPS to get a tracking number but nothing was ever mailed and the tracking was never updated.

Amazon doesn't appear to care if the package status changes to "shipped" of not as long as USPS got paid?

> I'm going to start looking for another e-tailer to use.

What alternatives are there that don't have the same problem?

Walmart.com also has problems with fraudulent sellers (gray-market items) but it's not as bad.

I'm sure your departure will affect their profits greatly.

This is a problem for a small subset of people, so no, they don't really have to solve this.

What sort of counterfeits are we talking that is so bad that they lose your business?

So far I've had counterfeit auto parts and water filters show up.

The problem is I never used to have these issues when buying from them. The part was correct - every time. Now when I order something I have to allow an extra week or two before I can actually use it, just in case I have to do a return. Like in the auto parts example - If I want to replace something on the car that requires disassembly, I schedule a Saturday for it. But then the part arrives and it's of poor quality because it's counterfeit, so I have to reschedule my time, and perhaps a friend's time who was going to come over and help.

If this happens once, it's an annoyance but dealt with. If it happens repeatedly (it took 3 tries to get the legit water filters because of co-mingled stock at Amazon), it's waaaay beyond annoying.

I agree. I'm pretty sure I've been a victim of this, though it's hard to prove.

I'm far more skeptical about Amazon now.

My family has migrated more purchases to Amazon than I even realized. I got tipped off when I noticed that now the recycle bin fills up so much faster than the trash can.

Which brings up the main issue I have for to-the-door delivery: the packaging. The insane amount of boxes inside of boxes really makes me feel guilty. There was a project at Amazon in 2008 to have consumer friendly, "frustration free" [1] packaging, as most packages are optimized to stand out on store shelves and prevent theft. (Of course that makes them bulky and hard to open. With posed toys that secured with wire and screws, it's even more maddening.)

Where has that effort gone? Did it fall out of favor with manufacturers and / or consumers?

I would love to have Amazon drop off my order in as little packaging as possible and even collect & reuse special durable bottles and such for frequently used items like laundry detergent.

This seems like an opportunity as they increasingly build local warehouses and take ownership of the supply chain and delivery logistics.

[1] http://www.adsavvy.org/amazoncoms-new-frustration-free-packa...

I'd be much more enthusiastic about their frustration free packaging if fraudulent items weren't so endemic.

I know it isn't guaranteed, but blister packs from the manufacturer are less likely to be tampered with, right?

Fraudsters just manufacturer their own fake blister packs that look just like the company's.

When amazon delivers things via Prime Now they typically come in brown paper grocery bags. Obviously when handing things off to UPS/USPS/FedEx you can't really do that.

Though I will say recently I have had some things shipped in their actual product boxes. I ordered a food processor and it arrived in its store packaging. I guess the issue there becomes package theft, considering you can easily know the contents. Maybe some simple brown paper wrapping around it?

It would be too expensive/time consuming to wrap packages. Boxing and taping is much more efficient at scale.

I always assumed "frustration free" packaging was their way of resealing returned goods.

I would like a returnable box. You can hand it back to the the delivery guy next order.

Peapod has demonstrated that no, you wouldn't actually want this.

The delivery guy would not like that though.

The problem with re-using a box is that it loses a lot of integrity after the initial shipment. Its crush rating is reduced and chance of tear increases sharply. Many damaged and ripped parcels at the post office are due to box reuse or bad packaging combined with incorrect crush rating.

It would have to be inspected to make sure its ok to re-use. Does not have to be cardboard.

Agree, that would likely work or a solution could be found.

Perhaps it could instead be sent back to Amazon for recycling?

Packaging may not be the best for the environment, but I think it may compare favorably to everyone driving to the store for each small item.

i know what you're getting at, but they started to address this. Send some stuff to Goodwill with your box in the meantime [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/xde6cauvpfp66o2

I've had an account since 1997 and I'm close to canceling, not getting started. I've weaned off, only making a few orders a year, which I still do because I get Amazon credit card rewards.

I was okay with missing out on fast free shipping unless I paid $100/year, because I could still get slow free shipping. But now that I don't get the best price on a given product without Prime, shopping there feels like a bad value. The competition competes well on price now without extracting an annual fee.

As of a few weeks ago my Amazon rewards card gives me lower rewards than if I paid for Prime, so I'm looking for a new card. I'd chosen a card without an annual fee for a reason.

For the first 15 years Amazon trained me to buy online from one place. But in the last 5 it trained me off of that behavior. I have the added motivation to reject Amazon because of its treatment of employees and its business practices, but as just a customer and not an activist it's become a bad deal anyway.

I haven't yet seen any online retailer compete on time to ship compared to prime. One of my few online purchases OFF Amazon was some Vet-only cat food - and it took them 2 weeks. Not only that but I ordered it on a Thursday, and there was a label that was generated that day, but watched thet tracking - it didn't get into UPS' hands until Tuesday. I would have shit a 1000 bricks if Amazon did that.

I do get however that the company itself has a lot of internal problems to fix.

You're comparing Amazon to one random e-tailer that you picked somehow. I've stopped most of my Amazon buying in the last year or so, and most e-tailers are just fine with their shipping times. They have better prices too.

AFAIC, Amazon is a has-been. It's a great place, however, to get crappy Chinese counterfeits at inflated prices, if you're looking for that kind of thing.

Chewy.com ships prescription cat food in two days for free. It's free shipping if you spend more than $49 (easy with prescription food...) or sign up for auto-delivery (which also gets you 5% off). They also have excellent customer service, easy to use website, and great prices. Auto-delivery is stupid convenient too since my cats eat exactly the same amount each day so my usage is very constant.

I'm not affiliated, just a happy customer. I didn't even know about it until I got an AMEX offer for them a few years ago.

Amazon "free" shipping seems very costly to me amortized unless you impulse order a whole bunch of cheap stuff very often. Paying for upgraded shipping on an as-needed basis seems like a better value. Or simply reduce consumption...

You're also comparing apples to oranges.

Can confirm. Chewie also handles subscription deliveries in a much more predictable way than Amazon. Amazon monthly deliveries occur on unpredictable dates (+- 5-7 days). Chewie schedules a shipment on a particular date and sends you an email before the shipment in case you want to make changes.

EDIT: Chewie's prices are lower too. So it is possible to compete with Amazon if you're focused. I do wonder why Amazon is so bad at stuff like this though. Chewie's procedures seem to be the "obvious" way to do things from the customer's perspective.

For scheduled monthly deliveries, Amazon does not notify you of any price change. In one instance, there was a 30% price increase month-to-month, and I just happened to notice it out of sheer luck. The same product did not change prices on Chewie.

Thank goodness chewie.com redirects to Chewy.com -- the discrepancy between your comment (which says "Chewie" five times) and your parent's (which says "Chewy" once) was worrying me.

Try, if you can, to find a retailer that ships/fulfills from a location near you. I am an Amazon Prime customer, but I still order most (if not all) of my outdoors stuff from Backcountry.com or their affiliate site Steep And Cheap. Their warehouse is in Salt Lake City and even non-expedited (ie "standard") items show up in 2 days. I'm in Seattle.

I don't know if this extends to other e-tailers but Backcountry is consistently great for us, and many west-coasters I imagine.

If you are ordering product(s) that weigh less than 13 ounces, any seller in the USA can get you 2-day ("Prime") shipping via USPS First-Class mail for between ~$2.50-~$4.00 depending on weight.

Almost all Prime products are marked up $2.00+ over the non-Prime listing, plus Amazon is taking a 15% fee of the purchase revenue. They don't actually have any edge for low-weight items as far as I can tell.

If you impulse buy 6 2oz items, Amazon is certainly convenient, but you'll be overpaying an extra $10+ for shipping if Amazon doesn't package them all in one bubble envelope.

I've been exclusively an Amazon customer for basically my entire life because I thought ebay was scammy and confusing and I thought no other retailer online could compete with Amazon's shipping. Now Amazon is just as scammy as ebay and I realize that actually most other retailers can compete in various niches. Now I only buy from Amazon when I absolutely have to or I'm impulse-buying, and I'm pretty close to canceling my Prime account. By the way, it turns out ebay is pretty awesome. Ebay is way cheaper for all commodities.

Why not buy Prime? It's one of my favorite no-brainer subscriptions apart from music streaming. Just curious what your reasoning for not having it is given that you seem to be a pretty big Amazon user.

I've averaged fewer than one order per quarter for the last few years, so $100 would amortize to be a very expensive shipping fee. (I wouldn't use the streaming.)

If I spent $100 I'd feel pressured to shop more at Amazon rather than shop for the best price, and to do more consuming in general. Neither of which I want.

Amazon is removing the friction from and incentivizing impulse buying. The aggressiveness with which they push Prime should be a big warning sign. My original disinterest with Prime has become stubbornness to avoid it. The more Amazon resembles a monopoly, the worse off for consumers in the long run. So I believe spreading my support to other businesses is a good idea anyway.

I know this problem isn't unique to Amazon, but what are people's thoughts on the potentially unsustainble levels of e-commerce. I know plenty of people who are in serious debt (primarily student and credit card) and still blow tons of money on Amazon.

Given that the general levels of debt are approaching 2008 levels [1], is this something to be worried about in general, or is it irrelevant? The main reason for asking is that if large percentages of Amazon's growth can be attributed to a rise in consumer debt, then wouldn't Amazon be disproportionally damaged by another recession and/or some sort of debt bubble burst?

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/16/pf/americans-more-debt-in-20...

Ease of use means a lot.

And the US obsession with consumer culture has trained people that buying is good, and "ending is better than mending".

I don't think it's just the US, most developed countries seem to be going down the same road.

> I know plenty of people who are in serious debt (primarily student and credit card) and still blow tons of money on Amazon.

I don't think this is specific to Amazon. As a whole, Americans seem to be too lax about taking on consumer debt.

Because some believe this country won't last the next 10 years

On that note, where is safe to put your money i wonder? Is there more and less stable mediums to hold your money?

If you're 40 you've probably experienced 2 to 3 boom/bust cycles (depending on the industry) as an earner. I think that kind of volatility and hope for the next windfall leads people to believe debt will work itself out. Or as is oft misattributed to Steinbeck: "... in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

As an engineer, boom/bust cycles like this remind me of system instability with insufficient damping. It doesn't work itself out; the oscillations get larger and larger, and then something breaks. Remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?

But the oscillations aren't getting larger. The great recession sucked, but it was nowhere near as bad as the great depression.

They are getting larger. You're looking too far back. After the Great Depression, policies were enacted which served as dampers to improve system stability. They worked for quite a while. But eventually these policies were eroded or repealed, and other societal factors came along which degraded stability, so the oscillations picked up again, and grew larger and larger (think 80s S&L crisis, '00 dot-com crash), culminating in the '08 recession. Now we're going to have a much bigger one with Trump and the GOP in office. If this one doesn't cause a collapse, the next one will.

The dot com crash was big for the stock market and for the tech industry, but it wasn't a really big recession; it barely touched economic fundamentals, just look at GDP.

Personally I doubt the next recession/slowdown will be anywhere near as big as 08, but I guess we'll see.

We always have recessions when there's Republicans in power (I'm not sure why voters haven't figured this one out yet); there was one with Reagan, one with Bush I, one with Bush II, etc. Trump and the current crop of Republicans are advocating very extreme changes (namely trade restrictions), so I think we're likely to have a more extreme recession because of this.

Yup. I've never really had a problem with debt, but i feel likewise to debt, Americans (myself included) spend without forethought.

A few months back i decided to sign up for Simple.com Bank _(a Bank, not CU unfortunately)_, as they let me preallocate all my purchases.

Every single bill, and every single purchase i pre-plan by several weeks. Want a new game? Mark it on the goals, and save $1/d for it. I don't limit myself on what i can buy, just when. This little mental change means that 3 weeks from now i likely won't care about what i was so excited for 3 weeks prior. It's worked wonders for me, especially with large purchases.

I wanted an Amp, to which i was aiming for around $600 for. Now, weirdly enough i can easily afford this and am willing to draw from my buffer to spend this $600. However i preallocated the money a while ago, and now i'm sitting at this special $600 which i could spend, but something is urging me not to spend it. Part of me feels like i could _gain_ $600 if i just simply don't spend it.

It's quite the bizarre assertions i feel like. The number of pre-saved goals i've later removed because i wanted the money more than the item.. it's weird.

Anyway, i'm deviated like hell. Apologies.

> Anyway, i'm deviated like hell.

Yeah you are. Don't you know you're supposed to spend everything you make every paycheck and then some?

Spend the money on experiences! Travel, go to shows, hit the road...

$600 is worthless in and of itself.

Meh, you can enjoy things. If anything, i dislike travel. I like my guitar, i heavily enjoy playing it, and frankly i do need a new Amp.

Though i think this is a great example of how mentally, how it's working for me. I actually need an Amp, but by saving the money ahead of time, suddenly i get a chance to mentually "unspend it".. it's bizarre, but it's how i feel. I literally have $600 sitting in my account right now that i'm having a hard time spending, because it's more real than the Amp.

Quite interesting.

For a lot of Americans, $600 is life-changing.

Of course when you spend it, it is valuable. But OP had mentioned enjoying the feeling of simply collecting the money, a notion which I can't help but challenge.

Assuming the OP you're referring to is me, i may have mislead you a bit. It's not joy in saving money exactly, but building good habits/etc. I've got a lot to save up for, retirement, investments, dental work, etcetc. So it's not that i enjoy the dollars exactly, but i want to have security in finance, for the long and short term. Building good habits is really crucial to being happy there, imo.

>the main reason for asking is that if large percentages of Amazon's growth can be attributed to a rise in consumer debt, then wouldn't Amazon be disproportionally damaged by another recession and/or some sort of debt bubble burst?

It's not quite the same thing. The majority of the blow in 2008 was from subprime mortgage lending. High levels of consumer debt are not necessarily a bad thing in general. Particularly for Amazon, you're talking about short term revolving credit. They are not financing big ticket long term payment plans like a mortgage. Thus their exposure is minimal.

The concern is not that Amazon has direct credit counterparty risk, but rather that if a dramatic credit contraction happens that Amazon customers will see a sharp downtick in credit availability and thus spending power.

Said differently: if many of your customers are using credit to fund their purchases and credit dries up, you can be screwed.

> The main reason for asking is that if large percentages of Amazon's growth can be attributed to a rise in consumer debt, then wouldn't Amazon be disproportionally damaged by another recession and/or some sort of debt bubble burst?

I don't think so, and I think I'm a prototypical example of why.

> I know plenty of people who are in serious debt (primarily student and credit card) and still blow tons of money on Amazon.

I "blew" tons of money on Amazon while I had student debt. I bought batteries, phone cases, specialty food items (not even luxury -- in fact, kinda the opposite. Just hard to find.), music, pens, paper, lots of books (especially textbooks), pet supplies, clothes, etc.

I would've bought all that stuff anyways. Life doesn't stop just because you're in debt. You still need to eat, sleep, feed yourself, talk to people, and take an occasional mental break with a movie or book.

Amazon isn't fueling new spending among consumers. It's largely off-setting spending that would happen anyways. I barely ever visit Target and literally haven't stepped food in a Walmart in maybe half a decade. Pre-Amazon, I'd be in one of the two at least once a week.

I went to Target last week and remembered why I buy everything on Amazon. The experience is terrible and, in many cases, you end up paying more at brick and mortar even after shipping!

That is a very sensationalist way to view debt loads. First of all, there are today 20 million more Americans than there were in 2008.

Second, there has been real income growth.

When considering the sustainability of debt levels, it makes much more sense to look at something like household debt service payments as a percent of disposable income, or total household debt versus GDP.

To be fair, interest rates have a big part in debt service payments, but I think if you look at this chart of debt service payments vs disposable income, you'll see we're in a very different position than 2008:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

I am reminded of the story of Sears. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears

When times are good, it seems impossible to imagine how a company could fall, but it can happen to anyone.

Considering they had a great catalog business and totally missed the internet, I don't think that really applies here. Amazon is very well situated to be a part of multiple different industries developing on the horizon.

It's media business alone could be huge if they figure out the marketing angle. They are really doing a poor job of pushing "Prime Video". I just went to the website and couldn't figure out how to get back to https://primevideo.com which I found last time. They have two different interfaces for browsing videos.

I didn't even know they had such a great selection of original content either. I would have tried them out over Netflix for a couple months long ago.

This may be their weakness. They are good at building products and the infrastructure that goes with it, but they are bad at marketing. Largely because they didn't have to develop this internal skillset with their ecommerce business.

So if anything it will be that that hurts their ventures. I doubt they are going to be a Sears given that they have diversified and future-proofed properly,

I think what they were trying to say is that some day a historian may state, about Amazon:

"Considering they had a great Internet business and totally missed the _________________."

Something will perhaps come along after the Internet, which none of us can imagine right now. Sears had been on top of their game, had everything figured out and optimized, but they didn't adapt.

In 1990 you wouldn't have the hindsight of saying how Sears messed up. Just like there's no possible hindsight for current times. Sears seemed unbeatable back then. Like amazon now.

In an interview Bezos himself doubted if Amazon would exist 100 years in the future [1] ..... which is actually a great view to take in order to keep innovating and growing and existing ....

[1] I don't have the source handy nor could I find it with a quick search .... so take it with a grain of salt & pepper.

For me as customer, Amazon is almost the best, some times I think it could be better. The UX for their video service is awful, but okay.

For its employees I hear only bad things, like that Amazon won't talk to the union in Germany or what The New York Times wrote a couple of years ago.

I'm so conflicted about this company. But it matters. Both sides matter.

Wasn't that NYT article found to not be very accurate?

No. While one or two data points may be fuzzy, and it's the case that Amazon gives teams a lot of leeway in culture definition, it's wholly internally consistent with the quiet conversations you get with people in Seattle.

I'm not so sure that not talking to a union is a bad thing. :-)

What is the consensus here on HN? More and more I feel like Amazon is becoming the next Standard Oil. In the case of Amazon, they are leveraging technology in all spaces and optimzing everything. Could they be the next Standard Oil?

What happened with Standard oil?

The 30 second answer is that standard oil owned an incredible percentage of the oil market, both in horizontal expanse as well as vertical integration.

They were broken up by the government through antitrust regulations, and IMO the most interesting part is the constituent parts became worth quite a bit more after breakup.

Curious about how anti-trust laws for an e-commerce firm might play out in 5-10 years, with the internet + globalization having come so far since Microsoft, I'd imagine even the US government would start to lose leverage breaking up something like Amazon.

Generally, HN is bullish on Amazon, with the usual bear crowd.

IMO: Amazon has not turned the screws in ways that are causing signficant complaint. I would guess, based on the usual history of duchies, founders, etc, when Bezos starts checking out, Amazon's behavior will begin to significantly alter, and that will trigger a very interesting time. I'd guess that by 2025 (8 years out), enough pressure will have built up for antitrust and similar to be applied to the online giants. "Why is Google a virtual monopoly in search? Facebook ubiquitus in social media? Amazon in retail/online services", and the pressures from society will begin to force hearings and so forth. I would guess that the end game will be that the definition of utility services will be expanded and an load of regulation will be piled on them to ensure that it's not exploitative.

Just in time for Mark Zuckerbergs run for the presidency then...

Walmart will play in enough similar businesses to keep them in check.

Sometimes I'm afraid to think what would happen if Amazon merges with Google. No other combination would be so terrifying: neither Google+FB, nor FB+Apple, nor anything else. Amazon and Google control so much nowadays. It's probably very good that they're still independent companies and sometimes competitors.

Speaking as someone who works at one of these companies, we're happy about it too. The "other guy" is what excites me about my work. I would dread being the only player in the market.

Not to be a dick, but someone who works at a company doesn't really have an important opinion with regards to that company's competition in the global market.

The owners of a company are who count, and they're generally investors who would be happy to form a monopoly and perform an innovation-free rent extraction on the planet for the rest of time if possible.

As per the article their PE ratio is above 172 and it already reflects their "would-be" profits after 2020. Isn't this too much risk to invest in AMZN?

Amazon always reinvests most of their profits into growth, so the PE ratio is somewhat irrelevant, or at best misleading.

Edit on downvotes: this is not a controversial opinion, see this respected analysis from 2014: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

Whenever someone says that an established metric is irrelevant to discussing a publicly traded company, I think they're mistaken.

Whenever people optimise for metrics at the expense of what the metric is supposed to be a proxy for, I think they're mistaken.

Agreed. P/E ratio shouldn't be the sole metric used to evaluate a public stock, but it is a useful proxy for evaluating its current price. And when a stock has an outlandishly high P/E ratio, there needs to be an outlandishly compelling story behind the stock. I don't see that with Amazon; I see a company that does the majority of its business in the US, has trouble overseas with some of its offerings, and that has plentiful competition worldwide.

How about if we made an improved metric, which takes Amazon's story into account? Something like static-profit/equity, with static-profit being the profit they would be making if they weren't investing in growth?

I suspect this is difficult to get exact numbers for since separating per-item costs vs growth-investment costs won't be separated. But I don't think it would be hard to estimate given a slightly more detailed breakdown of operating expenses.

Sure, if Amazon was forthcoming with any detailed sales breakdowns, but they aren't. Try to find any specific Kindle sales etc. It's always vague "Best sales ever" type comments.

My biggest issue with the Amazon crowd is the idea that Amazon is such a special snowflake in terms of operations that investors need to disregard P/E completely, because of the theory that Amazon can just "turn on profits" at will instead of redirecting cash flow to expansion.

Retail isn't a new business model, nor is AWS. The only thing that is relatively new is selling over the Internet, and the barriers to entry for that are lower and lower each day; and it's not as if Amazon is lacking competition in each of its business areas.

It's similar to the hype around TSLA; that somehow TSLA will be able to achieve an Apple like model where they skim all the profits off of the EV market, and that their competitors are incompetent in comparison to TSLA. I'm a huge fan of Musk, and I hope his multitude of endeavors succeed, but I'd never invest in any of them long term.

I think PE ratio is something that can not stay high forever. At some point it has gotta catch up with the profits. I can understand that Amazon reinvests most of its profits and can "at-will" switch itself on to generate profits but the problem is that this future switching-on is already been included in their current PE ratio for most part. So the real issue is that it's damn hard to calculate the right price of stock with correct margin-of-sefety.

The growth trajectory of Amazon baffles me. In its early days, I had heard a lot about Amazon's failure prophecies from luminaries of the Tech world. Their real power is behind the scenes, far away from their shopping apps. There's no doubt they will be in the forefront of many initiatives over the next decade.

The real power is behind their culture.

Amazon has incredible 'leadership principles' that are the cornerstone of it's culture.

This strong culture keeps the company innovating and relevant.

And not a single word about climate change and sustainable growth. Oh well.

Amazon has one of the most phenomenally dangerous vulnerabilities of any company I've ever seen. All it takes is a mildly critical look at how they fund their growth. Amazon requires massive amounts of employees in order to grow. They throw increasingly-more-expensive new employees at increasingly-less-viable new businesses. These businesses are always massively cash-flow negative, and with the right amount of luck some of them might one day turn a profit. They fund this growth in three ways: 1) Issuing new shares of stock, 2) Paying employees with stock, and 3) Funneling cash flow from mature businesses back into the business.

Because of accounting difficulties and not-so-explicit public reporting requirements, Amazon gets away with hiding how much they use #1 and #2, and can make people believe that #3 is the dominant source of funding. But the fact that they don't tell us how much #3 contributes is indicative of the fact that it doesn't; if you can't prove positive information, you hide negative information.

Now here is the vulnerability: A moderate negative impact to their stock price sets off a chain of events that could destroy the company. The most critical employees holding the ship together are paid mostly via stock...with 2 year vesting times. As long as the stock prices keep growing, they overdeliver on compensation. But if stock prices fall, everybody gets a paycut. If the stock were to drop 50%, these employees would get a 25% pay cut. And they'll jump ship in massive numbers, as you would expect any time a company cuts pay by 25%.

Without a cash reserve, all the potential remedies make the problem worse. Amazon could respond by offering more stock to employees. This lowers the stock price through dilution, and people rarely consider stock offers with falling prices to be an incentive. They could respond by selling more stock and making up for the pay in cash, but they would kill their stock price if they needed to sell enough to offset a 25% cut in pay. They could kill off unviable businesses that suck the most cash, but their stock price hinges on the existence of those unviable businesses to make investors believe there is growth potential. They could try to spin off businesses, but the high growth businesses prop their stock price up and the low growth businesses are worth less to the market than the value amazon receives from their cash flow. Everything they could possibly do will reinforce the drop of the stock price and flight of talent.

In other words, Amazon can't just reset expectations and lay a few people off. They're sitting on a classic example of a runaway positive feedback loop[0]. Amazon knows it relies on stock speculation of growth potential to not die, that's the reason why you're reading this PR fluff right now. Amazon is the death star; the visible parts make it look like a tool for universal domination, but it's just a small torpedo blast away from nonexistence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback

Amazon is too big to fail.

Ethereum will be a solid threat to AWS. Overall.

Amazon, the world's biggest net unprofitable website, kept afloat by investors expectation of turning on net profits in some distant unknown future.

It's like, the laws of gravity doesn't apply to American tech firms but ruthlessly expected from the rest.

It's only a matter of time before Walmart kills Amazon. Walmart has enough cash to copy Amazon and steal their market share. The unchallenged status of Amazon will signal Walmart to enter it's turf and steal away the competition.

Whether I buy a box of condoms on Amazon or Walmart need not matter. Whoever gets it to me quickly and cheapest wins.

Short AMZN and long WMT

"It's only a matter of time before Walmart kills Amazon. Walmart has enough cash to copy Amazon and steal their market share."

I am intrigued by your statement. How do you think Walmart can accomplish this task?

It's very easy, people have been buying from Walmart longer than Amazon.

edit: Walmart has enough cash to copy Amazon in everyway at a discount-Walmart has been watching Amazon very carefully and is able to learn without failing or expending capital.

When the capex fails to yield the returns investors were hoping for, it will significantly hurt confidence in Amazon.

Amazon is built upon share price. When it goes down so does it's survival prospects. Nothing goes up forever.

Walmart on the other hand is far more robust and stable. When Amazon trips, Walmart would be in a very good position to put the final blow.

Yet the market continually overvalues Amazon. I actually saw someone comparing Amazon to Weyland-Yuteni from Aliens!

> Walmart has enough cash to copy Amazon in everyway

Reality does not work that way, sometimes a cash rich company just does not get it.

Since you are so confident about the future I assume you have shorted Amazon and gone long on Walmart.

I know some folks who prefer Walmart because of the price of entry ( Amazon Prime yearly fee ) is a big turn off for them. I suspect there will always be an extremely price sensitive crowd that will prefer Walmart if they can save even a few dollars and take the risk on easy customer service / returns.

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