Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed

If you ask, "cui bono?", the decision on who to side with is pretty obvious, at least for the average consumer.

Amazon has for decades been one of the most pro-consumer companies out there. The publishers have been slapped in court for trying to collude to raise prices. In fact, the whole source of this dispute is that Hachette wants the option to charge more for its books on Amazon.

So on the one hand, we have a company that wants us to pay more for the same product. And on the other hand we have a company that, while large in the ecosystem, is by no means a monopoly (maybe it is a monopsony, but even that is someone questionable considering they only have a 65% share of the market), and wants to charge us less. You can always buy the publishers' books from a different store if Amazon won't sell them. Well, if it weren't for the DRM the publishers originally insisted on, you could.

Hrm. Well, I know where I stand on this.

Hugh Howey is really one of my favorite Authors and I picked up all of his books on the Kindle. I probably wouldn't know him if he'd signed with brick-and-mortar stores for paper books, as I stopped buying those dust-magnets.

Talk to a publisher that has resisted Amazon, and ask what happened to the sales.

This is probably a cognitive bias obtained from reading the industry trade press.

There's a notable alternative -- you don't have a meteoric rise to giant status, but you also don't collapse. These sorts of "happy medium" companies are in the vast majority even in our industry, but they're less likely to end up on the front page of a news feed, esp. those biased toward the fast growth (startup) community.

Also, you forgot the last stage. After becoming super rich, the CEO gets inspired by something other than heading up a vilified corporation, then goes off and founds a foundation that does great humanitarian work. Now that the company is not on top and the founder is doing exclusively good stuff for humanity, no one hates either anymore :-)

edit: fixed pronouns and adjectives because it pointed ambiguously in the sentence.

Companies follow a pattern of rapid growth, dominance, senescence, then irrelevance as other companies eat their lunch.

Kodak is a prime example. So's RCA (who remembers them?). Sears. IBM. Xerox. All once considered unstoppable juggernauuts.

In fact, the conventional wisdom is that companies inevitably grow to take over the world. There are no instances of this happening - there are only cases where a company survived senescence by successfully making their competition illegal.

I totally agree. In the tech industry at least, stock performance seems totally driven by growth. Companies that stop growing for a few quarters are seen as failures, when maybe they just reached an equilibrium for a while.

I would think that equilibrium was fine, maybe even a good sign- it's a successful business that's humming along. But short-term investors want to see growth, so they can cash out their investment in a few months or years.

The positive aspect of all of this is that it constantly drives evolution and innovation through competition. The part that sucks is that businesses are forced to constantly grow (or waste lots of money on failed attempts to grow), until they get so big compared to their optimal size that they just stop making sense as companies and crumble under their own weight.

Supposedly the plan for the Amazon online store has always been to barely break even to establish their customer base, then to raise the prices of items to start making money. They started doing that last year when the price of their products started being more than competitors. The increased price of Prime was acceptable to me, but when I can go to a local store and purchase the items for cheaper, then that's the price increase that I do not want. Their algorithms determine the maximum amount of money they can make off of customers rather than basing it off of what the products actually cost, it makes sense for short-term profits, long-term profits are difficult to predict.

Only the young die good.

AWS is far more vulnerable to online competition right now than Amazon the retailer is. There's several companies that have the available infrastructure to compete with Amazon in the cloud... Google and Microsoft are already out there, and Amazon is finding themselves cutting prices to compete.

Nobody really has Amazon's physical goods delivery infrastructure. You can look at Wal-Mart and Target, but they have infrastructure designed to solve a very different problem, getting large amounts of the same goods to certain physical stores. They rely on semi-truck drivers to deliver palettes of goods to stores. What they don't have, for example, is Amazon's very close relationships to UPS and USPS. Could they develop it? Maybe. At great expense. Would they be able to peel off more existing Amazon customers than they'd be cannibalizing their own current sales? Who knows.

This makes no sense.

Walmart Online to dominate Amazon? Walmart has been trying hard in the online space for ages! What indicates they aren't trying hard? I'm sure they're trying as hard as possible. A major problem for Walmart is engineering talent. Top engineers don't want to work for Walmart. The brand has negative value for an engineer. Innovation and the ability to leap frog will be hindered by this brand problem.

And as far as "pick out items online and have them boxed at the customer service desk". Yes, it does sound reasonable - in fact they've been doing this almost since day one (Site-to-store). It's obvious and it doesn't solve any real problem. I don't want to have to get in my car, deal with traffic, park in a huge parking lot, wade through crowds and Walmart, wait for a disinterested customer service rep to find my online order (let's hope they didn't forget anything), ring me up, then haul everything back to my car, drive home, etc.

I want to click a button for what I want, then open my door that same day and see my items sitting there waiting for me. That is human progress and innovation that Walmart isn't going to be able to match.

I disagree with most of your points, but agree somewhat with the non-sold by Amazon nonsense, and the generally poor quality of 3rd party sellers. You have to be very watchful with this. Not using Prime isolates you from this pretty well, as you can easily filter by items available under Prime shipping terms, and 3rd party sellers that put their stuff in the Amazon warehouses to make them Prime eligible avoid the slow shipping problems and are generally not an issue. However, the third party sellers on there are giving them a bad reputation, because people are not distinguishing them from Amazon proper.

I seriously doubt there is any personal retaliation going on.

I don't think they should split the business, as one of the things that makes AWS good is that it has to keep Amazon running. The initial concept of AWS as something that Amazon can use to meet demand peaks, while selling excess capacity makes a lot of sense.

If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix.

Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.

The right way to implement "ship to store" is using something like "amazon locker". Assuming that's the correct route, amazon will win, because it can choose better locations than a walmart store . And in retail location is everything.

But the fact that amazon has tried some lockers but it doesn't seem the common way to buy stuff, and there's no huge scaling effort from amazon, seems to indicate that people prefer to recieve packages at home.

And bezos understands that in this game, if you want to make profits, you need for customers to love using your services.Having that ability at low enough costs could earn you a monopoly. And than might be the time to play with "amazon lockers" and other cost cutting measures.

I'm with you with the splitting, I don't think these to fields belong together and they can work much more independently with a split. But they probably will only split if one half goes down :\

But I like the Amazon store quite much, don't know any other company that offers a similar service (in Europe/Germany).

Should there ever appear a seemingly real fault line in Amazon's long game, I think at some point they'd be forced to sell the infrastructure / hosting platform to keep investors happy.

That fine, so long as you've figured out a way to provide authors food, shelter, and health care via alternate means. Otherwise, we will see people less willing to put the work into making great literature.

It isn't that the author is motivated by money as much as great work is all but impossible when fit between the gaps of everything else. Professional authors spend months of full time work to put out a book.

Worse, we will still get works, but they won't be as well-edited, well-researched, and those take a toll on quality.