The False Tale of Amazon's Industry-Conquering Juggernaut | Hacker News Reader

The False Tale of Amazon's Industry-Conquering Juggernaut

wired.com

35 pointsyarapavan20 comments

My understanding of diapers.com is different. What I read was that Amazon got in a price war with them and sold diapers at a loss until diapers.com was forced to sell because they could no longer compete. And once amazon bought them, they just shuttered them.

So that’s a PERFECT example of how they could throw money at the problem and kill the competition.

I'm sure theres a direct source out there, as the former CEO of diapers does not hesitate to discuss his aim to crush amazon.

https://collaborativegain.com/the-diaper-war-amazon-whole-fo... https://www.recode.net/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-do...

This piece has a monopoly on the use of the word monopsony.

Amazon’s book monopsony is valuable, but it also comes at significant reputational cost

Does it really? Except maybe from defunct book publishers and ebook publishers that get on the wrong side of KDP's inscrutable approval process. Even DOJ sided with them in 2012.

My wife worked for a publisher that had terms dictated to it by Amazon. Since then, we have not bought through Amazon. I got the hairy eyeball for ordering a $10-book through Alibris, and had to explain that I was not aware that Amazon had purchased it.

Weird article, kinda like a pick-n-choose game.

Amazon does control 50% of e-commerce. And yes it uses merchants to get there, while charging them a nice fee.

And does it really ,fairly compete with merchants, while having full control(owning the buy box and the "sold by Amazon" brand) , full visibility into their business, and much better capabilities ? Or instead of competition , they just let merchants carry the risks of the import business ?

> In fact, I can’t think of a single industry, other than bookselling, that Amazon has entered with significant negative repercussions for the incumbents in that industry.

uh.. aws?

AWS is arguably an original category.

Unfortunately this is really just an opinion piece. I’d like to see some empirical work examining Amazon’s impact on different markets.

AWS creates its own market...Only until recently it became to eat pies from IBM/Oracle...etc.

That was covered later in the article:

> Amazon is great at inventing new categories, from online bookselling to cloud-computing services to voice-commanded personal assistants.

The author is categorising AWS as a new category more-or-less created by AWS, rather than an existing category they entered and disrupted.

I'm not sure I 100% agree, but it's still a reasonable position to hold. VPS providers existed before AWS, but AWS is much more than just another VPS provider.

In 2017, IBM cloud revenue surpassed Amazon’s: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/07/28/ibm-beats-...

Also, Amazon did not succeed in China; is second in India - is throwing $$ for last many years to be number one but victory is nowhere in sight.

Amazon is utlimately collection of good, mediocre and bad PMs, Devs, Designers.

Um. They've overtaken flipkart in market share and revenue

Source?

That reads like a paid PR piece.

For whom? And to what end? What are they even selling?

PR, public relations. Not selling anything but promoting the image of Amazon.

Netflix aren't the incumbent in TV so claiming they aren't really damaging Netflix seems to be intentionally missing the point. Amazon are having a similar, but slightly lesser effect, to Netflix by dint of their somewhat smaller streaming market share. Not to forget they bought out Lovefilm, imdb, and probably a bunch of others I forgot.

Trying to convince people not to be afraid of Amazon? Because the general thrust of the article is “Amazon is big, but they’re not very good at anything but books”

I had the same reaction when I read it. This is an Amazon PR piece with the goal of making them seem not like a monopoly. Monopolies try to hide the fact that they're monopolies.

Amazon isn't all that special. The rest of corporate America just fucked up.

Fast delivery and low overhead is frankly something any webshop could have delivered but the dinosaurs were set in their ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com