Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

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Nah, both companies have a major weaknesses that no amount of money seems to be able to solve. Namely, user experience.

Example 1, Dropbox: Google & Amazon seem like companies ideally positioned to destroy Dropbox. They excel at making network infrastructure at scale, they both have competing products and massive existing customer basis. Yet Dropbox has managed to compete and win on user experience.

Example 2, Netflix: Both google & amazon have tons of money and massive amounts of users to cross promote a premium video service to yet neither YouTube nor Amazon seem to have figured out how to produce consistently good original content to the same degree that Netflix has. Netflix should be dead by now yet it’s doing very well. YouTube/Amazon also have much poorer interfaces than Netflix.

I could go on. My point is that plenty of companies successfully compete with both Google & Amazon.

Not the most airtight examples. Dropbox was first to market with an innovative service, they've been losing market share ever since Google Drive which now has 25%+ of the market. Netflix was also an innovative service that was first to market. So now there's a new monopoly type of a company who dominates a new market > cable tv. Smaller company can't oust bigger ones unless it is actually possible for them to #1. Out innovate and implement a better service and #2. Hope the monopolies don't catch on to your idea and overwhelm it with their resources (i.e what Blockbuster could have done by adapting an online model). Those 2 critical circumstances don't have all that often.

In the case of Netflix, there are also some distinctions between their strategy and both Google's and Amazon's strategies that can't easily be erased.

Netflix has a 100% subscription model that includes original content plus enough licensed content (mostly TV) to fill things out.

Google is basically an engineering organization (ADDED: that makes money through advertising) that probably doesn't have a lot of interest in becoming a studio or in licensing a lot of content.

Amazon wants to offer subscription video as part of a broader bundle at a price they want to be attractive even for people who don't use the subscription video a lot. And they also want to sell video a la carte whether online or as disks.

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