Apple now valued at more than Amazon, Alphabet and Meta combined
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
That Amazon isn't worth more is puzzling. I know I've stopped buying from them unless I absolutely have to because I can't trust that the product I get is non-counterfeit and previously unused -- seriously, who sells used shavers as new, totally f'in gross -- but has everyone else stopped buying too?
update: grammar
IMO Amazon's foray into 3P market-making will ultimately be seen as an attempt to grow the product that ends up killing the product.
Even besides the counterfeiting, there's just so much crappy junk. Want lightbulbs? Wade through page after page of crappy no-name brands who all have fake/gamed reviews, so you can't tell the good from the bad. Want a name-brand lightbulb? Well, then we're back to the counterfeiting problem.
Even when I do buy from Amazon there's at least a 50% chance what I buy will be some cheap bullshit with faked reviews that will fall apart in under a month of use. Amazon is worse than the Walmart discount bin.
Amazon has weirdly given me a newfound appreciation for traditional retailers. There is value in the curation - in filtering bad products so that as a customer I can shop with confidence, and that even if I don't do too much research the product I buy will be good enough - or at least authentic and safe.
The complete laissez-faire free-for-all model just results in me Googling for product reviews for the most mundane things I buy. It is a massive time-sink.
It is true, and it does happen.
This is why any wise Amazon seller will use Amazon labeling (an Amazon-generated barcode specific to that item and that seller).
The simple answer is that Amazon is the least profitable company in the list (even less than Meta in its current state). There are factors that excuse this, hence Amazon is actually valued very high compared to how little money it makes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
I left a review warning others this was a possibility, but Amazon removed it since it was critique of a seller rather than the product.
It’s impossible to tell if you’ll get a genuine product if Amazon censors reviews critiquing sellers sending the wrong product or no product at all.
WEXIM
PEIPU
SEMRE
MIADY
YEAKE
(Answer: WEXIM and SEMRE are waypoints, the rest are brands)
I wonder how the sellers decide that "ah yes, today is the day I'll start selling YEAKE-brand USB cables". It sounds vaguely English, I guess.
We weren't the only ones to get a fake birdfeeder, fwiw:
https://www.wpri.com/news/call-12-for-action/counterfeits-on...
> WARREN, R.I. (WPRI) — Aspects has been in business for decades, manufacturing bird feeders that come with a lifetime guarantee. So in 2016, when a customer called about a defective hummingbird feeder, the Warren-based company took the complaint seriously. “We went through the process of cutting the plastic and looking at all the different molding telltales and we realized it was not our product,” Trisha Torres, the CEO of Aspects, told Call 12 for Action. Torres said the product was a counterfeit. She knew if there was one, there had to be others.
> “We found that it was just rampant on Amazon,” Torres said. In 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 3,828 counterfeit Aspects bird feeders in 68 cartons. Federal court records show Aspects won a permanent injunction against the LLC that made the shipment, but even now, Torres still finds fakes on Amazon. “My customer service department has fielded hundreds of these calls,” Torres said. “People’s knee-jerk reaction is they are just angry at us. They think we’re not standing behind our product.”
Amazon makes it's profit from AWS, which is in the same business (and beating) Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Putting Amazon and Apple in the same business is a bit more of a stretch. Amazon sells things (and is nowadays mostly a middle man for third parties selling things through Amazon warehouses and delivery), Apple designs (and has them manufactured by third parties) things from CPUs all up the value chain to devices and it's software. The overlap is partially in services, but of which aren't particularly strong right now (Amazon Prime Movies/Series vs Apple TV+). There's not really a competition on devices anymore (Fire Phone/tablets vs iPhone/iPad).
Because capitalism is efficient, and because there are lots of dollars chasing the Lock-in Problem, and moreover because AWS is the market leader, it has an enormous amount to lose. Even if 0.5% of the aforementioned startups succeed in reducing dollars lost to lock-in by (say) 10%, on average, that's billions that AWS stands to lose. (By my armchair math)
The market prices these risks in.
It reminds me of this:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/butterflies-parasitic-... "These Butterflies Full of Wasps Full of Microwasps Are a Science Nightmare"
Also just ditched Android and Fitbit and got a new iPhone and Apple watch, pretty much decided to suck it up and join everyone else (and not a moment too soon because my Android case is starting to bulge out due to the battery again). And first impression is that they're really nice products and its worthwhile. Really wish Apple was a little more open of an ecosystem and that their products were more repairable--but for all the whinging and moaning about Apple that hits the headlines here on HN they seem to be miles better than anything else if you're just an average person.
If regulators force AWS to spilt from the rest of Amazon it will be like the breakup of Standard Oil: shareholders will make more from the separate entities than they did from them combined.
Not for long, Apple is getting into the ads game as well, and much more strenuously than until now.
I think it's interesting, and still kinda sorta valid since when tech companies surpass the value of companies like Ford and Exxon, they make similar hoopla, even though those are in entirely different sectors.
So I try to buy books from thenile or eBay instead.
Revenue sources: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-big-tech-makes-their-bi...
Profit breakdown: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/big-tech-revenue-profit-...
MSFT has more diverse sources of revenue than the FAANG members dependent primarily on consumer directed ads and so won't be as badly affected by a downturn in consumer directed ad spending.
Every adult in the modern world has a smartphone and buys a new one every 2.5 years. Apple sells what is seen as the most premium device, with high margins.
Storytime! As it happens, I was working at MSFT when the first M1-based MacBooks rolled out.
I actually ran around trying to get people to look at the specs and talk about this serious emergent threat. Rank & file SWEs just shrugged, and the vibe was that I wasn't senior enough to be allowed to worry about it.
I don't know what management was thinking. But, looking back over the years since, I'd reckon that whatever they were thinking was too quiet.
(There is a sidebar I am omitting about Permission to Worry, which is the name of an upcoming newsletter article I intend to write about this phenomenon -- I've come to regard it as the singular most important privilege that an organization can assign an employee -- but it is well beyond scope for this thread.)
[1] If I Parse Correctly
Microsoft doesn't really care about Apple in the same way that Apple doesn't really care about Microsoft. Both companies operate in their own lanes, serving their core userbases. Microsoft sells OSes, subscription services and as a footnote, hardware - how did M1 threaten that?
Apple has increased Mac sales by ~20% over the past 5 years, but it's still ~1/4th of the money they're making off selling iPhones. Even if the M3 impresses everyone again with a 40 hour battery life and increases sales by 30% (a generous stretch), Macs still wouldn't be Apple's moneymaker or priority. You want to get an idea of how small the Mac is to Apple? The App Store makes almost 3x more money annually than Mac sales. Their de-facto iPhone monopoly is more valuable than the entirety of the Mac platform.
I think "Permission to Worry" is a pretty pretentious title considering how Microsoft butters their bread, but take my opinion and numbers with a grain of salt.
Sure, yeah, MSFT sells an OS and a cloud -- both are actually pretty awesome these days. But they only got those things on the back of performant Intel silicon. Network effects did the rest, but those network effects were, as it were, tethered to the world by the quality (and modest cost) of the hardware it empowered.
I propose that, like a hurricane moving over land, a software-platform company that loses the first battle -- for the immediate hardware-mediated user experience -- is going to start unwinding.
We don't have to look far for examples. Facebook is currently in just such a death-spiral, in no small part because Apple --- now in a place to dictate terms --- decided its users would be better off with more privacy, and cut FB off from the flows of data it needed for targeted marketing and ML training.
The ability to simply shrug off a behemoth like FB (and leave said behemoth scrambling, vainly, to own the next hardware platform) should surely be enough to get any unbiased observer's attention.
Awareness of the Home-Hardware Advantage is, I imagine, also why my former employer foists Edge on everyone with dark patterns and nagware. They're afraid of Google creeping down the stack. (Like they did on mobile.)
Leaving Apple as gatekeeper for both the desktop and mobile is essentially to submit to Apple hegemony.
I no longer have a horse in this race, but from where I sit, it looks like Apple has outplayed everyone, and the market knows it. (Hence my original comment.)
What do you think Apple will do to Microsoft, once Microsoft products are primarily accessed over Apple devices?
What does anyone do to their competitor, once they can control where, and how, that competitor can talk to its customers?
It really feels like you're not looking at the chessboard at all.
I also don't have a horse in this race (used the latest & greatest from both Apple and Microsoft/Intel/Nvidia), but I don't think you're seeing the entire picture either.
First off, Apple hasn't won. There are still markets they don't cater to (budget computing, HPC, gaming, machine learning research, CUDA programming, 3D design/rendering, native Docker development, the list goes on), and they show no interest in poaching those users. Second off, you're overestimating the impact of Apple's advances here. Performance-per-watt is a nice advantage, but it came at the cost of abandoning x86 and paying insane up-front costs for next-generation silicon that led to a disappointing M2 cycle. One thing is certain, though - Apple's performance entirely relies on their ability to out-bid competitors for competitive components, which gives them a default monopoly (as the richest company in the world).
> What do you think Apple will do to Microsoft, once Microsoft products are primarily accessed over Apple devices?
Apple will do the same thing they've always done, beg third-parties to stay on their platform with under-the-table deals that bolster support for the App Store. Microsoft makes Apple money, to remove Office365 support would be paramount to telling your business customers to pound sand. All of this is ignoring the antitrust regulation mounting against Apple for their completely unfair abuse of the App Store and software distribution. Even still, they will never have the leverage to kick Microsoft where it hurts because they'll never have competitive market share. Like I said in my previous comment, assuming the most absurd conditions (like Mac sales growing 30% YoY), it would be decades before Apple had enough control to pull that off.
I hope you're right, and Apple tries to act cute while the trade commissions are watching. We're long overdue for another nuclear platform abuses lawsuit like the one we stuck Microsoft with in the mid-2000s, all it would take is one silly move to push us there.
By my lights, winners don't have to take all in order to have won -- approximately half the market is sufficient. Enough to dictate terms for most users most of the time. That's Apple in 2022, and the market is reflecting that fact. In fact, I daresay that if Apple hasn't won, it is, at the very least, mate-in-three, or thereabouts.
A more interesting question is, what psychological comfort is there in minimizing one's perception of their hegemony?
I'm thinking in terms of avoidance of discomfort. Ideologically, I've been a FOSSian my whole life -- I'm in my forties, and I was a teenager when I first installed Red Hat.
But I'm increasingly aware that, despite having won the battle with the NT kernel, we somehow lost the war. Specifically, we were co-opted by Apple, Amazon, and, yes, now Microsoft too.
It puts food on my table but it leaves me feeling a little empty. I don't know about you. <3 Maybe it's the same?
It's hard to admit you're a bird in a cage. It's even harder to admit that the next generation will be.
We can both disagree on our subjective interpretation of Apple's ecosystem, and our subjective opinions on where they're headed as a company. We both seem to agree that they're objectively molesting the market though, so we're frankly not disagreeing on much. Still, "permission to worry" is a silly albatross to wear on anyone's behalf. Sounds like an article GameInformer would write about the Xbox 360, not an article discussing the merits of modern computing.
The article is as-yet unwritten -- the premiss will be that in general, the privilege of being permitted to worry about any given thing is, in an organization, the most critical plank of status. The opposite of a window seat.
Pay, equity, everything else -- not as important.
It has little to do with my former employer specifically. It's anthropology.
The consumer market figured out a long time ago that spending a lot of money on some new tech product when the one you already have still works fine is a dumb idea. No-one buys a new PC every 3 years any more either.
I assume some people still get a new phone every couple of years because they're buying an overpriced deal from their network and it comes with a new phone each time they renew for another 24 months. Otherwise the networks wouldn't still push those plans as their default option.
I'm not sure anyone I know does that though. From random personal conversations most of my friends and family seem to either keep their existing phone and switch to a much cheaper SIM-only deal once they've paid off the original deal that had a bundled phone or they buy their own new phone separately and then take out a SIM-only plan immediately.
Even if everybody intended to keep their phone 4-5 years and replace the battery once until it couldn't install new apps...
...stuff happens to an object you drag literally everywhere. Just the number of phones that slip out of a pocket in a taxi alone.
Yes of course a desktop PC that sits at a desk and isn't dropped and goes nowhere is going to last longer.
Sure but I bet most phones don't break or get lost within two years, or even within four years.
I think there is an element of identity in many of the products apple sells, but more importantly they are the best way to access the apps where people really do source their identity.
Interesting comparison made by Horace Dediu: “Netflix, Apple and Microsoft all have similar P/E ratios. (25-26). Meta and Google have collapsed (9 and 18.5 respectively.) Amazon is holding 100.”
https://twitter.com/asymco/status/1587430613405110272?s=46&t...
"Apple is bigger by market cap than Microsoft, Google, Amazon & Facebook combined"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447454
https://thenextweb.com/news/apple-now-bigger-market-cap-micr...
I know. I’m still in the red on a block of my AAPL holdings.
(in fairness, Amazon is really all about AWS, which almost seems like its there to prop up the e-commerce business)
I miss the old days when everything I bought from Amazon came from Amazon and was trustworthy and not a fake.
Their terrible worker treatment isn’t endearing in any way either.
> Their terrible worker treatment isn’t endearing in any way either
Aren't these also things Apple struggles with?
#2 is a problem with companies Apple contracts with. And Apple holds those suppliers to high standards, partly because of past attention.
The dirty little secret is everyone uses Foxcon and other companies like them. MS does (did?) for Xboxes. Other computer makers. Electronics device makers. Everyone. Very few companies have their own factories they run top-to-bottom.
But the headlines are pointed at Apple. That gets clicks. Do those other companies try to keep worker standards up the way Apple does? No one covers that, do they.
But Amazon owns the warehouses. Amazon sets their labor standards. Maybe there are subcontractors for the workers or divers. But it’s 100% Amazon’s control. Amazon didn’t contract everything out to a logistics company. Amazon IS the logistics company.
That’s a very big difference in my book.
Yeah but they're Chinese workers, so people are happy to look the other way /s
Ever use Tensorflow? Or... use 8.8.8.8 as a DNS server? Or... Gmail? or Learn something from watching YouTube?
One has to pay the bills somehow. If Google disappeared from the Earth would the replacement be better?
google has done great, I don't buy ' literally revolutionized the human experience of recorded information? ' -- it's simply not true; they just did well in that niche.
Had they gone insolvent another similar group would have dominated that same field, that should make it dead obvious that their business (search specifically) wasn't revolutionary -- just very successful.
But, one thing it does do is open the world to people living in rural areas who wouldn't otherwise be able to access so many goods and services (of, admittedly, varying quality and provenance).
It's the Sears Catalog of the 21st century.
Could you explain your position more fully? Perhaps a bit about how society would function without advertising.