"no problem I have a Domino's pizza delivered with your favorite toppings."
I was in the mood for pizza hut.
"No problem...wait domino's is having an alexa preferred partner special...would you like $4 off?"
Particularly on Amazon, where many people are selling re-branded stuff from Chinese vendors which can be obtained much cheaper on AliExpress or eBay.
To give customers the best possible shopping experience, Sellers must meet performance-based requirements to be eligible to compete for Buy Box placement.
All Buy Box eligible offers are then further evaluated to determine the Buy Box winning offer. One "New" and one "Used" condition offer, as applicable, will receive Buy Box placement.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_...
--- No reason to think Alexa will work differently
What you're really seeing is not that there is a winner takes all, rather every product is being turned into such a unique experience that there can only be one.
Lets go back to 19th century. You received grain which could have been produced by any farmer. Yes there was different quality of grains and you judged every grain you bought based on it's individual quality, but at the end of the day, there were thousands of farmers providing you with grain.
In 20th century when 'branding' arrived, then although there were different kinds of products, at the end of the day once you chose Pepsi, you stuck with it, if you chose Wonder bread, then that's mostly what you ate. In many ways, Pepsi had a monopoly in providing Pepsi cola drink and Wonder bread had a monopoly in providing Wonder bread.
In 21st century, the experience would even more extremely brandized. We have seen this with Apple computers. When you buy a Macbook, you automatically buy the different hardware devices Apple chose for you, and many people are completely ok with (in fact love) this echosystem. If you don't like it, then you go ahead and buy yourself an Android phone and a PC.
That's a nifty little portmanteau of echo-chamber and ecosystem, though I do recognize it could have just been an innocent misspelling.
most vendors of course will dive head-first into this arrangement with their eyes wide open, because most of them don't think long-term, they want that revenue now cost-be-damned, and quite frankly they're just not as good as the executives running amazon.
see: walmart from 10 years ago. wonder how many of those nice folks made the move from arkansas to seattle recently...
You get all these perverse incentives towards the short term via the board and the CEOs they pick (never mind the whole stock option bonuses etc the CEOs are offered).
For example, if Dominos were the only pizza provider, they would be able to offer whatever terms they wanted. Amazon only leverage would be mutually assured destruction [0] of not offering any pizza. If there is a diverse markets of pizza providers, Amazon can dictate the terms and drop any provider who does not play ball.
In fact, many companies make a point of having multiple upstream providers to limit the leverage any one provider has over them.
[0] Not quite an existential threat to either, but painful for both.
(Which McDonald's or Burger King isn't a whole lot better than McDonald's, but I think you are overstating the ability marketers will have to wedge people)
(https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/meet-the-artist-usin...)
The alternative to self-driving cars that behave badly is not necessarily other self-driving cars, but simply non-self-driving cars.
self-driving cars will quickly prove to be thousands of times safer than human-driven cars. given a few decades for public opinion to align with the facts we'll see human-driven cars heavily regulated as the extreme hazards that they are.
> I can't see either happening if self-driving cars have major limiting factors like that.
the 'limiting factors' are introduced as optional 'luxury features' several years after self-driving cars have established domination of the market, and over the years are integrated downward into more accessible models.