
At 20 Amazon is bulking up. It is not yet slowing down - rahimnathwani
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21604559-20-amazon-bulking-up-it-notyetslowing-down-relentlesscom
======
mathattack
I'm amazed by Amazon. Some of their moves follow a playbook. Books -> Clothes
-> Diapers. A non-technical CEO turning the company into an API machine that
outsources it's own technology... Every textbook would say crazy, but he's on
to something. Makes one wonder about the drones.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm amazed by Amazon_

I, on the other hand, am underwhelmed.

Their AWS services is a pretty cool tech and business.

But as for their other stuff:

1) Their core business (the store) barely makes any profit. Their profit
margins are razor-thin, and until recently operated at a loss IIRC.

2) Their ebooks and music store are ho-hum.

3) Their hardwares, Kindles (Fire and plain) are simply loss leaders for
content sales. Which (1) is not that profitable in itself anyway. Not that
difficult to sell stuff like readers and tablets at a cost or slight loss.

Anything else I forget about?

~~~
mistermann
> 1) Their core business (the store) barely makes any profit. Their profit
> margins are razor-thin, and until recently operated at a loss IIRC.

The choose to do this. I read an excellent article on it some months back but
can't find it again, but suffice it to say there is far more to their low
margins than you think.

~~~
mathattack
Yes - the general idea is they could monetize their business to get profits
now, at the expense of future growth later. They write to their shareholders
to be patient, so it's transparent.

------
holri
Reasons not to buy from Amazon:

[https://stallman.org/amazon.html](https://stallman.org/amazon.html)

~~~
yeukhon
Hmm. Every time I see the name Stallman I just conclude it's all about
materials not distributed freely. Essentially, don't buy anything from anybody
who don't support free redistribution (iTunes, App store, Play Store, etc).

~~~
holri
To conclude something from a name without reading the works and criticizing it
factually is just prejudice.

~~~
hga
But in cases like this, it's useful prejudice.

I for one don't need to read every rant by RMS against Digital Restrictions
Management, _even if I agree with him by and large_. I have much better things
to do with my time. A lot of useful prejudice work that way in a lot of
domains.

I have my own personal boycotting policies, and one of them is to never, ever
buy digital media with DRM. Which, strangely enough, Amazon has long allowed
me to avoid if the rights holder allows, e.g. I have a nice set of MP3s I got
from them for a CD of Scandinavian music that in physical form was by then out
of print and way too expensive.

They also tell you if a Kindle digital book has no DRM at the bottom of it's
description. _They don 't really care_, and I respect their choice to abide by
rights holder's restrictions and sell the stuff anyway.

~~~
holri
No it is not useful in this case, because Stallmanns page is much more about
than just materials not distributed freely. For your convenience the headers
of his page about Amazon:

* Restricting and Shafting Customers

* Censorship

* Exploiting workers mercilessly

* Shafting others in the publishing world

* Dodging taxes

* Political harm

~~~
hga
The additional stuff pretty much falls into categories of:

Already covered by my policies.

Don't believe it.

All big companies have some insanities; if that bothered me I'd be living off
the grid.

Don't think it's a problem.

And RMS and I have _very_ different political views ... and a lot of his are
remarkably uninformed (disclaimer: I knew him rather well in the early '80s,
e.g. we were roommates when he started the GNU Project).

This covers the whole Political Harm section, I'm "right wing" myself, so it's
not axiomatic I'd mind ALEC's lobbying, the Left's campaign against "voter
suppression" is a existentially dangerous campaign for more voter fraud, and
Stand You Ground laws have nothing to do with any sort of "Shoot First"
policy. Heck, I'm not sure I've even seen that insane phrase before, but the
gun-grabbers are ever inventive in their total dishonesty. (RMS is also one of
the last people in the world you should be paying attention to when it comes
to the self-defense area, it's a miracle he's still alive.)

Note, there's a relevant point in going into details below; this is an area of
personal expertise going back to the early '70s:

Stand Your Ground is shorthand/American value invoking propaganda wording
simply for having no duty to retreat, nothing more or less, although I suppose
if you're a rabbit it's antithetical. It's extremely valuable against abusive
prosecutors who insist in the calmness of a courtroom there was some plausible
way for you to retreat:

In two Massachusetts cases I'm familiar with, convicting when retreat wasn't
really possible, or would have required abandoning a child to the tender
mercies of a home intruder. As of late, it's been noted that more blacks have
benefited from Florida's Stand Your Ground law than whites....

The major point I'm trying to make is that RMS's sophistication about things
outside the domains where he's good, the ones relevant to me limited to
computer stuff, is _very_ poor, sometimes to the point of implicitly suicidal,
and I have nothing to gain from reading them, as I have just reconfirmed.

But e.g. when he coins a new relevant meme, like Digital Restrictions
Management, I do pay attention.

~~~
holri
Thankfully a lot of bother care about insanities. They are in the grid of
thinking, good people. The whole free software movement is a an evidence that
a lot of people care about insanities. RMS is the founder and forerunner of
this impressive socio political movement.

------
jessaustin
Interesting: how little was said about AWS.

~~~
rgbrenner
AWS was 4% of Amazon's revenue for 2013. I think about 4% of the article was
about AWS too... Seems appropriate.

~~~
omonra
That said, AWS has something like 80% profit margin [1] vs almost no margin
for the rest of the business :)

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/05/amazons-mountain-of-
margin...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/05/amazons-mountain-of-margin-in-
cloud-services-over-80-profit/)

~~~
sharpy
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer working for AWS. But not on EC2.

I feel the margin number conclusion is deeply flawed for variety of reasons.

There are some questions the author cannot have answers for, that greatly
change the margin numbers for EC2. A couple that comes to mind are:

1\. What percentage of time are customers being charged for the available
servers? 2\. What percentage of instance hours are being charged at on-demand
prices, vs reserved instance?

Also it completely ignores services that makes EC2 stand out from plain
hosting, and adds much value, such as AutoScaling, CloudWatch, Elastic Load
Balancing, OpsWorks, and Elastic BeanStalk. And believe me when I say that
support cost is NOT trivial. In many cases, the number of engineer hours
involved makes the support pricing look like a real bargain.

