Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtCameron | Hacker News Reader

What they are good at is trying a shit ton of ideas and then optimizing and doubling down on the winners. If they just "stuck to what they are good at" they would still be a small online bookstore.

View on HN

The issue is that they are slipping on things they used to be good at. They are a lousy bookstore now and even the general retail experience has seriously regressed.

Legitimately curious, but what about them is objectively "lousy"? ANECDOTE ALERT: I love how easy it is to buy a book from them, my new James Baldwin novel went from "read a review on another site, found it on amazon, ordered" in about 3 minutes, and the book itself arrived a day and a half later.

Carmack has a good recent example so I will defer to him for an example - https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/886229891720630272

I would expect a store of Amazons scale to do a far better job of categorising and searching information than what they offer right now. Also discovery of new books is very suboptimal in my opinion.

What results do you get for that search? The first and most are actually about video codecs for me. Then you have the weird erotic fiction, but restricting the search to "video engineering" is 2 clicks away on my phone, 1 on desktop.

I'm not sure they were ever a good bookstore, just cheap and online. They became the incumbent and it's hard to supplant the incumbent unless they falter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com