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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed your story and generally believe Bezos and Amazon to be very shrewd marketers and PR manipulators BUT ... do you have any evidence to back up your claims?

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WRT josefresco's request for evidence, could we not discourage these requests by downvoting? I keep seeing this lately, and I don't think he could have phrased it more politely. Whether the data (or lack of it) strengthens or weakens the argument, any challenge improves the quality of discussion, especially polite ones.

That's the beauty of manipulating the press. All the evidence is private. Your skepticism is what makes it such an effective method of molding public opinion.

Thanks for putting it so well. It is mental jujutsu. You leverage your opponent's strength against herself.

>You can get industrial motors, flanges, valves, fasteners, materials, janitorial supplies

This is a precise definition of Alibaba's market segment.

Alibaba connects factories directly to businesses. I don't know a ton about the company, my introduction was a story from maybe 2011 about a kid from Michigan who made a million dollars selling iPod minis to his classmates until Apple shut him down

Edit: I couldn't find the link, this is the closest thing I could find

http://www.startupbros.com/how-you-can-make-big-money-import...

Alibaba does a lot more than B2B. They do regular ecommerce sales like Amazon, run a financial service (you deposit money and earn interest, quite respectable interest too) and a lot more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group#Companies_and_aff...

His track record. Bezos did the same thing the night before Cyber Monday last year with his drone story in order to capture the news cycle for the day and get in front of consumers.

I think the timing is pretty strong evidence

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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