
Can Anyone Beat Jeff Bezos? - allenleein
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/new-establishment-list-disruption?mbid=nl_100117_Daily_VFHive&xid=a97d3766-d7d1-4c2c-b2ab-1dc8279a9da2
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kbos87
I don’t think that the world can quite fathom how dangerous Amazon actually is
to virtually every industry.

When it comes to purveyors of physical goods, Amazon has the power to reshape
the fabric of our streets and neighborhoods in ways few people can fathom. Say
goodbye to grocery stores and ground floor retail if they get their way. They
are just smart enough to do it slowly enough where they don’t have any jarring
sudden impact.

In tech, Amazon has tremendous power to put anyone they want out of business.
AWS puts them in the enviable position of understanding all sorts of intimate
details of everyone else’s business models. Again, they are too smart to do it
too quickly.

It pains me that my generation, a generation of people who dream of being
makers and business owners, don’t see the irony of the convenience of having
toilet paper delivered and lower prices at Whole Foods for what they really
are - a trick and a trap that strengthens a company that can and will have a
real tangible negative impact on everyone’s employment and business prospects
in the future if hasn’t already.

~~~
ams6110
For me, Amazon is a long way off from threatening my local supermarket and
other local retailers.

Would I buy clothes from Amazon? No, I like to try them on first. Returning
stuff by mail is a pain.

Would I buy expensive home furnishings from Amazon? No, I like to see, touch,
try these things before I spend a lot of money.

Would I buy perishable groceries from Amazon? No, because deliveries happen
when I'm at work and I don't want perishable food sitting in the sun for three
hours on my front porch.

Do I buy toilet paper from Amazon? No, because it's easier to pick it up at
the store when I'm there for something else anyway, than to get it delivered
and then have to deal with disposing of the cardboard box it came in.

And with anything Amazon, I'm worried about counterfeit goods.

So what do I buy from Amazon? Inexpensive, low risk, low margin goods, and the
occasional book.

~~~
deevolution
"Would I buy expensive home furnishings from Amazon? No, I like to see, touch,
try these things before I spend a lot of money."

I imagine AR might convince people otherwise.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
In fact it does. We've seen 2% purchase lift on home furnishings with our AR.

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RestlessMind
"Your margin is my opportunity" \- with that kind of attitude, Bezos is indeed
a tough competitor.

However, what puzzles me the most is the fact that investors are letting
Amazon chug along with barely any profits. Can someone please explain to me
how Bezos is able to pull off a P/E of 240 for AMZN, when the company has been
around for 20+ years and no longer considered a startup (i.e. no more hyper
growth phase)? For comparison, other tech titans have P/E numbers as: FB (37),
GOOG (36), MSFT (27), AAPL (17). Only NFLX (216) is in the same league as
AMZN.

~~~
sah2ed
My layman understanding is that investors think Amazon still has enormous room
to grow because Amazon's current market share of the entire US retail industry
(online + offline retail) is about 7%.

The one thing that will make online shopping appealing to far more consumers
is same-day and eventually 1-hr deliveries, irrespective of your location in
the continental US and the only way to do this _reliably_ is when fulfilment
is automated end-to-end.

For fulfilment to be fully automated, self-driving cars and trucks need to be
a reality as that is the only way to cap shipping costs in order to guarantee
Amazon's promise of low prices.

In order words, investors think Amazon's market share will grow even more as
distribution costs start to fall when the shift from human to self-driving
trucks becomes economically and technologically feasible.

Self-driving cars are still at least decade out, IMHO. Add another decade for
regulations (e.g. which party is directly liable in X types of accidents?) and
infrastructure (e.g. cooperative signalling, standardized charging stations
etc) to catch up. This is why Jeff Bezos likes to stress that it is still Day
1 at Amazon.

~~~
saosebastiao
I can guarantee you that the Day 1 phrase at Amazon has exactly 0% to do with
driverless cars.

And it is foolish to ascribe any singular viewpoint to investors in general.
While _some_ investors may hold the views you do, you’re likely suffering from
a false consensus bias if you think your views are shared by anything more
than a single digit percentage of investors in general or even specifically
Amazon’s investors.

As for the rest of your theory, I also think it is complete rubbish, but feel
free to do with your money as you please.

~~~
sah2ed
Sigh.

You throw around words like foolish, bias, rubbish instead of providing a well
reasoned counter argument. So all you have done is dish out a middle brow
dismissal, well done.

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WisNorCan
Apple iPhone seems to be doing quite well relative to Amazon’s Fire Phone.
Also, Azure is doing surprisingly well relative to AWS despite a late start.
Wouldn’t surprise me if Azure exceeded AWS in the near future.

Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design And in the second
enterprise.

~~~
Osmium
> Amazon’s weaknesses are in the first case high-end design

Just design generally, including their website ... anecdotally, so many people
I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or if it does exist
how to find it. Likewise for Music.

Apple has this discoverability problem too (Apple Music doesn't have a web UI,
it might as well not exist if you can't install iTunes, and then Apple wonders
why its social features don't take off).

For its devices, Amazon also seems to share Google's general obliviousness,
e.g. they just announced an alarm clock with a camera. Who wants a camera
pointed at their bed all night? Their Fire Phone pioneered this over-expensive
faux-3D UI, which on paper sounds great, but anybody could have said they
weren't going to get the development support they needed to really sell it,
and most users aren't going to care. Design is more than just veneer, you've
got to make stuff that people want... Amazon's current approach seems to be
"well if we just sell it cheap enough, we'll get customers."

~~~
ams6110
> so many people I know don't really know that Amazon Prime Video exists, or
> if it does exist how to find it. Likewise for Music.

I know these things exist, but I don't use them much even as an Amazon Prime
member. Why? Because Prime Video UX is poor compared to Netflix (and Netflix
is no great shakes either, but it's better than Amazon), and Music has a
pretty poor catalog and again a pretty poor UX.

~~~
Osmium
> and Netflix is no great shakes either

And this is mostly because Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their
library.

Hulu just had a recent, awful re-design too. They cover in-active thumbnails
with gradients, you can barely see anything.

Apple TV (which I like as among the best) also has a ridiculously unergonomic
remote and very confusing UI (do I want to press "menu" or "home"? And now the
TV app is 'home' by default, it's even weirder...somehow, even though I know I
think how it works, I always seem to press the wrong one.) And no picture-in-
picture either, though their processors are plenty fast enough to support it.
But their standard built-in TVML-based interfaces are functional, if a little
boring, and the UI is responsive. And hey, at least they aren't showing me ads
in the UI or tracking what I watch. But still, lots of little problems.

So much room for improvement here, by everyone.

~~~
bhollander823
What do you mean by "Netflix wants to hide the true extent of their library"?
Why would they intentionally create a worse user experience?

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Spivak
Because Netflix, unlike say HBO, bills themselves as a general source of
entertainment, a place you can always go when you're bored to find new
content. While somewhat true in the beginning Netflix today is increasingly
leaning on original content because most other big players realized that they
could cut out the middle man and still be profitable. Netflix's library today
is basically their original content along with things you could find in the
bargain bin at your local Best Buy which is a _much worse_ value proposition
than "your one stop shop for movies and TV". So their UI is designed to make
their library appear larger than it really is.

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HillaryBriss
> Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook have remade the economy in their
> image. So what happens if they turn on each other?

um ... aren't they _supposed to_ turn on each other? isn't that, like,
capitalism, and competition and stuff?

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panabee
if you're in the retail supply chain, you're at risk of destruction by amazon.
lower prices mean more commerce flows through amazon, which strengthens the
company. bezos evidently wasn't joking when he claimed, "your margin is my
opportunity."

for all the valid concerns about one company consolidating too much power,
amazon is also effectively saving consumers hundreds or thousands of dollars
per year.

the margins of retail middlemen are being eaten by amazon and essentially
pocketed by consumers or invested by amazon to eventually help consumers save
or enjoy more.

amazon fearmongering is easy and fashionable, but all policies hurt some and
help others. it would be refreshing to read an unbiased analysis of the trade-
offs society faces if amazon continues to devour retail.

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earlybike
It’s not about Amazon, it’s about the tendency that most online-based consumer
businesses evolve into monopolies. Mostly through network effects paired with
smart M&A.

So, the question is not if anyone can beat Bezos but rather beat online
monopolies in general.

~~~
petey283
This. The article is just another example of media bias toward overarching
narrative.

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Steko
The answer is Xi Jinping although the article doesn't mention China at all.

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adventured
Craigslist (classifieds). Google (search). eBay (auctions). Apple etc
(phones). PayPal etc (payment systems). Spotify/Apple etc (music). All
businesses Amazon attempted and mostly failed at.

Bezos - Amazon - has been beaten quite a few times.

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Feniks
Amazon came a few years too late and couldn't offer anything that sets them
apart from the competition (next day delivery is pretty standard fare for any
web retailer here) so yeah they were beaten. Or rather they saw the
battlefield and didn't engage.

THAT is what made Amazon big in the US: they were first. Nothing magical about
it really. But I think my country was one of the few that already had
established players. Oh there's China ofcourse, they are forerunners with
ecommerce. The future belongs to Alibaba.

Same with the supermarket delivery stuff, that's already been around for
years. Don't understand the fuss.

I have the feeling a lot of retail in the US missed to catch on to the
internet. Bezos became a god partially through incompetent competition.

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bootcat
Once they said Jeff is the worst CEO alive !!, now things are getting a change
!

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rglover
Moral of the story? Become a master of logistics.

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williamle8300
Like... physically?

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nadim
Likely MZ.

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Invictus0
The problem with these new giants is that people really want them around.
People don't care so much that their neighbors are going out of business; they
just want their crap cheap and as soon as possible. The current legislative
environment is entirely ill-equipped to deal with these companies, and
moreover, no one even knows _how_ to deal with them. What is clear, though, is
that the proliferation of supercompanies like Amazon is repugnant to the
ideals of the free market and must be stopped.

~~~
sweettea
I have a lot of sympathy for this argument, but I don't think it's fleshed out
enough. What happens to this argument if you do s/Amazon/Walmart/? I would
generally hold Amazon is better than Walmart due to the relative
decentralization of Amazon's sources (third parties can easily sell on Amazon,
but not at Walmart). Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least
without further tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart
problem. Walmart is struggling --- a nimbler, more convenient competitor came
along, and society also has a greater appreciation for specialty stores now.
Will that happen to amazon too?

~~~
Invictus0
> Your argument says Walmart is also unstoppable, at least without further
> tweaks --- and yet, we figured out how to solve the Walmart problem.

You're proposing that the solution to "the Walmart problem" is to create a
company even worse than Walmart, a company that drives other, larger companies
out of business? Whereas Walmart put out the mom and pops, Amazon is putting
out the Bestbuys and shopping malls. There is no difference. But people are
celebrating this, and heralding a coming age where no one has to work (caused
by Amazon-like processes and robots replacing retail workers and other jobs),
without really considering the complete disaster that this would entail. The
solution is not even more supercompanies.

