Hacker News Reader

Comment by jyu | Hacker News Reader

This is lazy reporting. Where did the money come from to do the acquisitions? Google and Facebook have great monetization by data mining their audiences for advertisers. All they needs is to buy more eyeballs (youtube, whatsapp, instagram, etc).

Amazon is slightly different. They benefit from the creative destruction caused by physical retail purchases migrating to ecommerce and the subsequent value capture by Amazon. Any revenue increase from them is from behavior changes, efficiency gains, and death of inefficient retail.

View on HN

> death of inefficient retail.

More like lobbying to maintain a tax holiday for a very long time. I suspect retail will slowly come back due to the end of that tax holiday, and Amazon's devaluing of their platform with counterfeits.

I'm also not sure that the distinction that you're making here is super-significant. Facebook and Google are plundering advertising spend from print just like Amazon took over retail.

Under Amazon, I would also include commoditizing compute and selling you their spare compute cycles (AWS) as their major efficiency win.

Finally, Amazon is automating warehousing in their logistics (first using automated checklists for people walking around the warehouse, now using Amazon Robotics, formerly Kiva Systems)

The myth that Amazon “sold their excess computer capacity” has been disproven for years.

Just think about it. If Amazon had excess computer capacity and sold it to other companies, what was it going to do when it needed that excess computer capacity? Kick others off?

Yes, that's what preemptible spot pricing is; you pay a discounted rate for some compute time with the knowledge that you could be bumped out at any time.

Alternately, Amazon could lease time at an hourly rate which varies with available capacity; just raise the hourly rates around Christmas because you need them for your e-commerce site.

I know what spot pricing is. I work at AWS in Professional Services. AWS was always built from the ground up as a separate service. Amazon Retail is still migrating some of their infrastructure to AWS.

It would be slightly inconvenient if customers needed more capacity at the same time that Amazon Retail needed more capacity.

https://readwrite.com/2012/04/26/popping-the-amazon-web-serv...

From Werner Vogels himself.

https://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com