stratelogical

This is classic "Porter's 5 forces".

"The number and power of a company's competitive rivals, potential new market entrants, suppliers, customers, and substitute products influence a company's profitability."

There are several hundreds of thousands of restaurants (maybe millions?). There are only 2-3 aggregators. Most of the restaurants are replaceable by a similar one. So aggregators have more bargaining power.

As long as there is a profitable business model for the aggregators, the restaurants will get pushed to their lowest common profits. Without resorting to collusion with other restaurants (or asking the govt. to intervene) the only way to compete is to differentiate significantly that makes the customer desire a specific restaurant.

In the US, this - "They made a pact to pull out of Gold and other discount programs for a few days." is collusion and is illegal.

If FTC allows restaurant owners (or any group of businesses) to create pacts like this against their suppliers or customers, next time, they will make similar pacts against you (the customer). "hey, what say, let's all make a pact together and increase the price of that dosa to $50?"

In reality, some industries (most famously airlines) do this kind of collusion through winks and nods anyway and is bad for consumers (very good for the industry as a whole though).

In an ideal world, we wouldn't care about which company is called a tech company and which isn't. This reminds me of that famous Bezos quote to the question of whether Amazon is an internet company or not.

He said "It doesn't matter whether we are a pure internet play or not. Internet, Schminternet, it doesn't matter. What matters is obsessing over providing customer value."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyrmPMJoG0Q

That said, it is altogether a different question whether WeWork provides value for customers in a fiscally responsible and sustainable manner, and whether Nuemann has the foresight and business acumen of Bezos.

Question is: would there be a lot of people willing to take these so called baby steps if they can post pics like this on the CNBC website - https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/edit..., and would that make them happier?

Where baby steps according to her is removing Facebook and Instagram apps off the phone, and logging out on the web “without fully disabling or deleting them”).

Got distracted by statements like “But the belief that everyone coding would solve anyone’s problems has been shown up as completely ludicrous. If anything, computer literacy has declined over the generations as computers have got easier to use.”

Edited title now, thanks.

I would add Robot deliveries to this list as well. Yes, if these take off, things will look different.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/25/16024470/starship-technol...

Yes, you are right. But increasing adoption across different zipcodes won't help that much (although, yes, it’ll bring SG&A per order down). The adoption has to increase in the exact same area (your point #2 has to be true, i.e. stops should be so close, like an apartment building) for drivers to make more orders per hour, and for this service to be profitable in the long run.

Do you say that in a good way, or a bad way :)

Yes, agree that it could’ve been better. I think CS should always flag any conversation that involves the police and get supervisors and senior CS staff involved.

Unbelievable. When signing up for 2FA, FB never said what else it would be used for. From a legal standpoint, aren’t companies are supposed to say what the phone number will be used for when asking for phone number?

Somebody from FB - please tell us this is a bug.

I think all positions (SDEs, Business Managers, Marketers) in Amazon's oldest retail businesses (books, consumer electronics, kitchen, home etc.). These are businesses where Amazon has significant market segment share (for example, according to some research out there, in books it is ~80%). So it is natural to think: how many people do you need to keep the lights on? Maybe 5 years ago these businesses needed 100s of people, but with with 80% market segment share, do these businesses need the same number of people? My thinking if I were Jeff would be: If I reduce head count in these businesses, how much more free cash flow would I generate (assuming there is not much room left for these businesses to grow)? In other words, in businesses where I have the highest market segment share, how many people do I need to continue to keep that share. And, if people can be moved elsewhere to higher growth areas, then why not? If I need to move them back to books and electronics at some point in the future, I will.

Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but the comments here are my own.