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Comment by bradhe | Hacker News Reader

What if Walmart and Google actually teamed up? Google technology powering Walmart's supply chain? I wonder how competitive they'd end up actually being vs Amazon.

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What compelling tech does Google have that Walmart needs? Google has no sought after experience in retail or ecommerce. What would they give the largest retailer in the world? They are a half a trillion dollar company moving physical products. They already know how to do supply chain.

It looks like play to stop Amazon’s growth more than technology.

> What compelling tech does Google have that Walmart needs?

Google knows that I've been researching segways( with possible intentions of buying). Could they possibly use the information for product recommendations, inventory predictions ect?

Yes, AdWords and related advertising products are quite sophisticated in terms of targeting. Walmart (and Amazon!) already use this.

But their own site is not customized to me when I go there to shop(sure its cusotmized based on referrer from adwords but it knows nothing else about how I got to liking that particular brand or what youtube reviews I've watched ect). Neither is their inventory/new item research predictions using this information.

wow, a Google and Walmart merger is an interesting thought experiment (if extremely unlikely). It would be like a second scary Amazon

there is no business synergy for Google & Walmart Merger, the both US companies merger.

What the Bloomberg article talks about is a joint venture of Walmart & Google in INDIA as a separate entity to buy Flipkart 75% stake.

I would guess, Google may take minority stake like 30% in that Joint venture, that may comfort Watmart .

Instaed of doing $15B on their own, and getting google skin to make sure the this takeover will success in long run aginst Amazon to put up $10 Billion and goole $5 Billion .

I thought I read Google is putting down $3B. So 20% stake at minimum.

Google has the most advanced search engine on the web. Most people do a Google search for product and probably end clicking on a Amazon link.

Instead of leaving Google, you could click on the product, see reviews and buy it directly from Google's UI.

The GP was saying Google's tech could enhance it's supply chain, not it's customer acquisition. That's not a tech advantage, that's called leverage.

Doesn't Google have a history of being unsuccessful at supply chain? Their Motorola acquisition was a failure on the production side (though some would say a net win on the patent and IP side). Instead of using their tech for supply chain recently, as another example, they went ahead and purchased many of HTC's knowledgable people in Taiwan...

Apple has an incredible grasp on supply chain, and Walmart and Amazon have a similar grasp on logistics. I think a lot of the knowledge in this space is about control and not necessarily solved by tech.

Google Product Search earned them a €2.4 billion fine from the EU for anti-competitive behavior. I doubt they want to repeat it.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm

A cloud platform that's an alternative to AWS.

It would take Googlmart 5+ years to play catch up if not longer.

Google's too disorganized and they don't have any supply chain tech built up. Amazon has years of supply chain infrastructure (both software, physical systems and organization) including supply/demand forecasting models and warehouse operational investment (Kiva systems, etc...).

The only differentiation that Google adds to Walmart is: - Top-talent engineering resources & brand which attracts talent to work on these problems - Layers of developer tooling and services that remove the "systems at scale" development curve of startups and smaller companies.

Now if Alibaba teamed up with Walmart... (read: acquired).

In Bangalore, companies like Google, Amazon, Walmart Labs, Flipkart, Directi, and LinkedIn all attract the same talent pool.

All of these companies can pay either as much as Google or more than Google to attract the topmost talent pool. In fact, many of the engineers in these companies frequently hop from one company to another between these. Of these, Amazon has the highest attrition rate due to stressful working conditions and they are sooner to leave to another company than the others.

Walmart Labs in Bangalore has a talent pool that is running a million node cluster based on OpenStack completely in house with zero dependency on something like AWS (of course!) or GCP. That's quite a feat and I think it will help Flipkart a great deal if Walmart Labs shares some of this incredible talent and resources they have built within their company.

Disclaimer: I work for Flipkart.

FYI: http://oneops.com is the tech stack used for "Application Lifecycle Management of Cloud Based Workloads" at Walmart / Sam's Club / Etc. It was aquired in 2013 but remains open source (not sure who else is using it though). At a high level it is built around Chef solo, and allows you to define application "assemblies" that can then be deployed to various clouds (on prem or public PaaS). Being cloud agnostic means it can shift workloads between different cloud providers with only minor tweaks to the applications.

It works well for a large company with many moving parts and a need for Enterprise wide policies/quotas/etc, but has some rough edges and leaky abstractions. Kubernetes is a more mature and widely used system that has many of the same features, just based around containers instead of VMs.

Disclosure: I work for Walmart Labs on our CDN / Edge Platform team.

Haven't they already? A few weeks ago I tried Google Express, and I really liked it, in general. I could get an order from CostCo, WalMart, Target, and others, over night for free if I ordered $35 or more. I ordered at noon on Friday and got the shipment by 10am Saturday.

This last week, Amazon announced they are increasing Prime to $120/year, and I started thinking about whether I needed Prime. For video, Amazon is barely usable these days IMHO. I'm mostly watching entertainment on Youtube, mostly how-to or edu-tainment stuff which Amazon doesn't have much of. Pretty much anything I reach out to watch, I have to buy from Amazon. Their music service has been useless to me too, I started with Google Play by uploading all my music, and could never get started with Amazon because it was too limited.

The most compelling thing about Amazon is it is one place i can go that has pretty much anything I'm looking for. Drawer slides, Sugru, specific DIY tools.

I gladly pay $15/mo for Google Play Family (music, no commercials on Youtube, for me and my family). But, $10/mo for Amazon is starting to feel questionable, when Google Express gives me a similar experience, without the pain of Amazon Pantry (filling a Pantry box), and Walmart will let me buy groceries online and then will bring them out to my wife's car on her way home (she works a block from the store that provides that service).

I think it's getting harder and harder for Amazon to justify the $120/year. Curious what other people are thinking.

> Haven't they already?

Yes. I think so.

Walmart Inc. and Google last August made it easier for people to shop from Walmart using Google's voice-activated home speakers. Similar partnership announcements followed between Google and other Amazon rivals including EBay Inc. and Target Corp.

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-02-15/worried...

This is actually happening [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/google-introduces-shopping...

There are actually a few possible synergizes, but less likely with their acquisition of JET.

Google's AI tech is superior than others in image and speech recognition as well as search. This mostly has to do with them literally buying all the AI talent.

Maybe a possible partnership with Waymo for level 4 driving tractor trailers.

> Maybe a possible partnership with Waymo for level 4 driving tractor trailers.

If I am not mistaken, Waymo is already an offshoot with Google, so Google already has a strong foothold in autonomous vehicles

Walmart has been working with IBM using blockchain technology in their supply chain.

https://www.cips.org/supply-management/analysis/2017/june/ca...

From what I understand Walmart's supply chain technology is already pretty competitive: https://www.tradegecko.com/blog/incredibly-successful-supply...

> What if Walmart and Google actually teamed up?

Anti-trust people would be all over that.

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