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Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

I get your comment and agree with it, but... It's funny how us (the HN/startup/pro disruptive audience) is very pro change (let's get rid off the middle man because we can create software that can do this cheaper and more efficient) and now we are 'rooting' for the brick and mortar business. There is a sociological take away somewhere here.

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While I'm for technological progress, I prefer to live in an environment where small entrepreneurs can thrive, which requires me to be skeptical when a giant, borderline-monopolistic company comes along with 'new technology' that's true purpose appears to be to subvert small business owners and take their customers.

Wasn't Amazon exactly this for many years?

You don't get to be the underdog forever. There was a very long period there where people hadn't realized that Apple wasn't the struggling underdog vs. Microsoft anymore as well.

Monopolies are bad, and since all the people on HN are the small business owner (or want to be soon), making people aware of what's going to happen is kind of important.

It's also not new: there are players trying to do this type of thing in every industry. You even see it in medicine.

People welcome change, but they're also weary of too much market power with any one player (see Comcast as an example)

Do you mean weary or wary? I can see that it might easily be both, though...

Oh I meant wary (I'd missed the distinction between those two words until now), thanks!

Amazon is a middleman too, just one that does lots of online shipping.

If they become the only middleman, than the situation gets much worse as there are no longer any market forces to keep Amazon's prices to be close to their costs. The only force at that point is Amazon's good will to not make a profit.

Don't worry. Amazon isn't even the biggest middleman:

"Last year, combined total volume of merchandise handled by Taobao and Tmall surpassed 1 trillion yuan, or about $160 billion, according to Alibaba. That figure was larger than Amazon’s $86 billion, according to RetailNet Group, or eBay’s 67.8 billion"

Some change/progress is good and some is bad and that doesn't seem like a subtle point. I don't know how anyone gets into the mindset of assuming change is inherently good or inherently bad.

Change can be good, but it also matters who is "running" the change.

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