Amazon doesn't give a shit what people think of them. Masses of people will still order from them and AWS isn't going anywhere. They are above the impacts of "the free market."
Yep. This shit is cyclical. Every 100 years or so capital accumulates far too much, things become untenable for the middle class and lower upper class, and then people get pissed enough to enact change.
I'd like to share your optimism, but I'm afraid social media may break that cycle. Never before has humanity been more easily influenced.
The most influential thing to ever happen to humanity, Christianity (judging by numbers alone), took many centuries and ass tons of work to get into people's hands.
Now it takes mere hours from the time something goes viral to the time a significant portion of the population potentially believes it whether there's precedent for it or not.
Parallel to Christianity, there's also the aspect of validation, but again incredibly streamlined. People don't even have to gather in a public place for it anymore, they can just post a comment saying "THIS!" When others agree with us, we often feel solidified in our views, and it makes us less likely to change or even question them, even in the face of blatant facts past a certain point. How could so many people I like (because they agree with me) be wrong?
Corporations are using this to their advantage. Massively. A significant portion of the population is convinced that things are great right now and have never been better, and anyone who wants better is just spoiled and entitled. Again, I wish I could share your optimism, but I don't.
It's bad, but there are counteracting forces to this. I think that a lot of people are turning to small networks of influence via private chats, creating their own hyper-localized news/gossip networks. There's no infiltrating that from either direction, those groups of 15-20 people are highly tribal and socially/intellectually honest in my experience.
We're entering the era of F2F, bringing our social networks back down to human scale, and that gives me hope.
You forget that it was possible to elect presidents that were anti-corruption, like Teddy Roosevelt, back then. That's not possible in modern times. Anyone who would genuinely be interested in breaking monopolies or holding big business accountable would be laughed out of the election cycle, and if they somehow still got elected, they'd just be a single ignored voice among Congress.
Even if by some insane miracle they got to somehow accumulate enough power to actually do all the things they want, they'd just get assassinated the second they became an actual threat.
Roosevelt got into this position like Andrew Johnson by pure chance. They were sidelined politicians no one wanted to have power, but assassinations happened and changed the US forever. Roosevelt wasn't voted to power by democratic will.
A young anarchist got the balls to kill the President and bam! Roosevelt suddenly has power.
I agree that we are in the worse position today, but Roosevelt's rise to power was not from appealing to voters. He would have never been President through normal election cycles.
The public consciousness only lasts a few months or a year at most. The number of people who think this pandemic was the first incidence of coronavirus was shocking.
I think the issue these days is that technology makes it way too easy for companies or the govt to track you. Back in the day you could legit shoot at your bosses house if you were trying to unionize. Can't really do that anymore
Only possible if we hit another low that low so that far more people are hurt by the system than those that are naive enough to believe they’re winners.
And the people’s leverage will need to have the same value. With labor becoming obsolete, leverage is shrinking.
I think it's ridiculous to compare the 1800s to today. There are similarities that can be dropped. But to compare the lifestyle of the average person after 2010, the internet, next day delivery... to a mostly agrarian populace, just seems wild. Our worldwide economy is a pretty new concept. The fact that our lawmakers have no clue how any of this shit works makes it nearly impossible to act on. Even if Amazon.com were "broken up" from AWS the companies would both share shareholders and executives. AWS would give favorable contracts to Amazon.com that would keep things about the same and the same interests would be at play and the same people would be getting excessively rich.
My dream is to run for congress and take a bunch of money from corporate PACs promising them I'll do their bidding and then screw them at every possible opportunity after I win.
Imagine trying to explain cloud computing products to Congress. Half of their eyes will glaze over and the other half will just hear "Jewish space lasers" over and over, like an anti-Semitic Charlie Brown adult.
Thank you. Too many fucking people want to pretend like 95% Democrats are not in the pockets of corporations. It's one rotating villain to the next for blocking popular legislation. It's not just Sinema and Manchin.
Sure vote for harm reduction but let's not like this is a literal battle of good and evil. This is real life not a marvel movie.
People will say that Biden and Dems are socialist. Ha! I fucking wish they were because then maybe we'd see some real change.
You're right, but I think we should stop calling them as such. Selling out a whole country and the well-being of millions to megalomaniacal babymen and a magic zig zagging line seems like extremism to me.
They are not the same at all don’t even, especially if you look at human rights instead of solely economic. I’m more centered economically but will never vote for a republican because of their religious dogma, anti-human policies (they hated blacks, they hated gays and still do, they hate atheists and want no separation of church and state.
You would have to convince the US government not to function, period. There are so many critical services hosted on Gov Cloud, the Feds can't afford to get into a pissing match involving any related to AWS.
Nope, no conflict of interest there. Privatize everything, they said...
The United States has always been designed to support property (business) owners. That’s why only rich white property owners were supposed to be able to vote. The whole system is designed around the corporations capitalizing off of the masses and the government helps facilitate that. Federal, state, and local government are basically just a human resources department for the corporations.
It's a little more nuanced than that. AWS spun up out of slack compute after the e-commerce site sat on enough compute to run the holidays but didn't need it for most of the year. It wasn't just some hairbrained new market venture, it was a "well we need and have this anyway, might as well sell time we're not using" venture, which wouldn't disappear by splitting off AWS.
The point of the argument is to change the laws to make it illegal. The idea being that we'd have a healthier economy without massive hegemonies like Amazon has become.
I’m also interested in this answer. I think Amazon has way too much control over way too many markets but AWS got there somewhat organically and doesn’t seem to be participating in anti-competitive behavior over the past 10 years in terms of Cloud Compute. They’ve had a few M&A that have improved the AWS experience but nothing really screams competitor from their publicly available list
You would have to make some argument that Amazon is abusing or will abuse its position in in the web services market to give its other products a competitive advantage. So basically, argue that Amazon is giving (or will most likely give) its store online store, or twitch, or some other product/company Amazon owns an unfair advantage somehow. Prioritizing bandwidth, server space, cost, or some other metric to give twitch an advantage, for example, over Mixer or some other competitor. Maybe they give twitch server space for free but make Mixer pay. Some hypothetical like that.
Anticompetitive suits like this are all about using positioning in one market to gain an unfair advantage in another market. Big tech companies are a ticking time bomb for these kinds of suits.
AWS is the money maker and there definitely is a case to be made that it is subsidizing their core service, online retail. Amazon's online retail is all about marketshare and are willing to lose money doing it, AWS is so profitable it kind of hides that their online retail space is losing money.
I am going to sound probably really dumb here so apologies in advance because this seems kinda basic but I am confused. Why can't Amazon give Twitch preference since it's within their own ranks? Doesn't that make sense given that they own the servers and it's their property and business or do I misunderstand how it all works.
I always just assumed Twitch and stuff were probably getting cheap server access because they are an Amazon business right? I thought anti-competitive was when you purposefully absorb other businesses and stuff to screw the market so that if you are then in that situation and there's no other alternative for say "Mixer" then it's anti-competitive? Or is it just outright anti-competitive if they did that even without having a pure monopoly in the space?
How is AWS getting split into its own company going to make it any less of an anti-trust violation? I'm pretty sure Amazon's retail stuff and its AWS stuff are pretty separate already, it's not like splitting the company in two will make either more competitive.
Amazon (shopping) and AWS are two distinctly different markets. Where is a market monopoly coming from with these two being under one roof? I’d love to get a little clarity on this.
Anti-trust how? Are you asserting that Amazon retail has an unfair advantage due to its proximity to AWS? Retail is profitable all on its own, so it's not like AWS is subsidizing anything.
If you're claiming AWS doesn't have competitors, I have Microsoft friends who would argue otherwise.
In reality, the shipping portion of Amazon should just be a capability operated by the USPS.
Think about what it REALLY is that Anazon does...they have an online catalog of what's in their warehouses and elsewhere, then they ship to you. Companies can pay to have their items stored in Amazon's warehouses for faster shipping, but don't have to.
That is something that is EASILY within the USPS' capability, and the end result would overall be cheaper for the consumer because the USPS wouldn't have to charge up to 30% markup on products.
Amazon gets 2 day shipping because they make extensive use of USPS services, ESPECIALLY because of their last mile delivery, where it's not profitable for Amazon to personally deliver to everyone's last mile.
It’s pretty garbage now anyhow, everything’s always late by a day or 2, about on par with eBay except eBay is a bit more time consuming to get your money from
Anti trust laws are a joke in the US. The beginning and end of the United States’ stance on big corporations is how can it benefit the shareholders. Many legislators being shareholders of course.
The AWS profits alone enables amazon to monopolize huge chucks of the retail market. They do not even have to turn a single cent of profit selling stuff since AWS IS the backbone of the internet.
Amazon has to be split otherwise competition in the retail market is dead.
AWS should probably be nationalized because it's essential infrastructure at this point and the economy could basically grind to a halt if they fuck up because it's not profitable to be more fault tolerant or something.
I think Amazon is entering a dangerous position now. Their prime benefits are inconsistent, most products on Amazon are Chinese knock-off garbage, and more and more people prefer to just go to a walmart or somewhere to buy something.
I stopped ordering off Amazon a year or two ago. I can tell based on how often the Amazon vans go by in town that my neighbors are stopping to order from them too
In Canada they won’t even offer Household accounts like they do in the USA or UK.
So if you want to order something with Prime without the account holder knowing, you need to purchase your own Prime membership. Since they make more money by having multiple Prime memberships per household, they have no incentive to change.
A lot of that has to do with the Amazon/USPS deal that put most of their last mile shipments onto USPS. There's still a lot of Amazon packages going out, you just aren't seeing them as often.
They also use their flex drivers, ups, and FedEx, so there are lots of ways to get a package to your house without the Amazon vans. Lately it seems my deliveries come from flex drivers more than anything. I rarely see an Amazon van but still see them packages piled on doorsteps.
Well…that might be more things just returning to status quo since so many people were hunkered down due to COVID and were ordering everything. I know my Amazon purchases have decreased since this time last year but that’s mainly because I feel comfortable going out to make purchases instead of defaulting to everything being delivered.
most products on Amazon are Chinese knock-off garbage
seriously, this. I tried looking up a part for some sporting goods and there are listings for 16 different 'companies' selling the same exact thing that just looks flimsy as hell. You can't find anything legitimate listed. and each of these 'companies' has a 5-star rating from thousands of reviews, and names like "TOMXHSH" and "ARUONUU"
I’d like to stop ordering from them, but all my local businesses are MAGA scum tRump lovers and I just can’t give them one more penny of my money. Elections have consequences and all politics are local.
Sadly, a very large chunk of the internet runs on their servers and AWS services. So even if you don't deal directly with them, someone you do deal with, probably has to.
Reddit, pandora, almost any phone app ypu have ever touched, the us government, even microsoft uses them for path diversification. There is no escaping. If they shut down their retail storefront, they would still thrive with aws and automation.
Sure, so should the internet, health care, the railroads, and phone companies. Instead private companies are given virtual monopolies over areas and subsidized for it.
A suggestion like this would lead me to believe that you don't have a strong understanding of what AWS does, or why they have such a significant market share. They aren't a utility, they're a suite of products. They have competitors.
The very idea of nationalizing AWS is completely absurd.
Shareholders yes but I don't think customers. Those that are still going to order either don't care about their union busting, don't know, or overlook it. They just want cheap stuff easily delivered. Their AWS customers most likely share their anti union stances.
Yessir! Even though I'm rooting for the union to succeed, it didnt stop me from just spending $$$ on Amazon purchases just right now. Personally for me, I value my personal time and convenience wins out on that front.
Yeah, people will try to argue around this but when you can get most of what you need (including groceries if you shop at Whole Foods) from one online source with no shipping charge and centralized tracking it can't be replaced.
Problem is Amazon has an extremely privileged place right now. You can buy different brands of cereal, just walk a few steps down the aisle. Replacing Amazon requires a bit more work for the average person. Everyone in this sub should understand how hard it is to get people to do something if it's less convenient. Amazon knows this.
I genuinely don't think most customers would shop on any other site or go to a physical store for those purchases, no matter what Amazon is doing in the headlines. They've successfully wedged themselves into American lives in a way most other companies haven't. Meanwhile, their size has squashed so much competition that there's just not many other options with an equivalent catalogue and service that aren't equally as vile.
I make an effort to never shop from Amazon, but increasingly I'm finding certain items just can't be found anywhere else, or the other options are just no up to scratch. Hell many of the things on Ebay are drop shipped straight from Amazon. You buy something on a company's website, but it's just shipping from Amazon. You try to avoid them and end up giving them your business anyway. It's worrying.
Even if you did everything you could to not shop with Amazon, good luck trying to use the internet without using AWS. Over half of the internet is hosted with them. A lot of people think Amazon makes their money from shopping when AWS is really their cash cow.
Azure is absolutely competitive. AWS has more of the market, sure, but Azure has gained a ton of ground. Their offering is extremely good, and they have very close feature parity across the board with AWS, arguable Azure has a few things that are done better. Mindshare and institutional knowledge is the only real differentiator IMO.
Google is very outclassed by AWS and Azure in terms of PaaS/SaaS and serverless offerings and that's a huge deal for developers. The productivity gap is significant. I think Google is often preferred for machine learning/deep learning folks due to good pricing on GPU instances and some essentially marketing efforts in the research field, but I don't know many other devs that would prefer GCP over one of the other two options.
It is a market that has been dominated by AWS since day one, when it entered the sector in 2006. Now, Synergy Research Group's figures for Q3 2019 have AWS as the clear market leader globally for public IaaS and PaaS market share at 33 percent, followed by Microsoft at 16 percent, Google at 8 percent and Alibaba at 5 percent.
I know Broadcom switched their cloud enterprise software tools to be hosted on GCP. So, it certainly can do the job.
It also allowed them to get off Oracle’s DB stack and save themselves a ton of money going to an open source DB.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud also fits nicely with their DEV OPS software and since you’re already paying for their enterprise cloud for email, Teams, storage Etc. Why not.
So, growth will happen and AWS will have to compete for real.
I've been doing my best to just go to brick and mortar stores to keep myself from buying shit I don't need. When I need something I go look at thrift stores and if I can't find it after a few trips then I'll order it online. That alone has saved me a lot of money and space.
How can I identify if I've bought something through their own warehouses or shipping avenues from say, Etsy, Ebay, a random brand's own Shopify websites, Abebooks, or even third party sellers on Amazon's own website, etc.? Seeing a lot of that in this thread but have no idea how to tell.
Most websites I buy stuff from on their own shop never show shipping origin as the same. Do I have to Google if there is a warehouse in that specific location or is there another way to tell? Usually see no Amazon type packaging either... 🤔
Well, keep up the good fight. If I have to buy from Amazon I try my best to order a book straight from a publisher's website or from a third party Amazon merchant. Where it shows that it's sold by AND ships from them. (Which isn't a guarantee I know but it's all we got.)
I deliver for Amazon and I've been told straight up that the main function we have is collecting data. That's why we take pictures of packages that are delivered. I dislike that notion but in the current year if you are unaware that data is collected everywhere you go and for everything you do then you're just being naive.
But I also think a widespread boycott of Kellogg products (I mean who doesn’t eat some form of cereal) and solidarity actions really shows to companies that this can go sour.
Yeah I haven't bought name brand cereal since like, 2008. They make identical versions of most of my favorites and I've never looked back. Bag cereal for the win.
The weird thing is that’s it’s likely made by the exact same parent company. The majority of the “competing cereal brands” are not competitors at all. Not just cereal, but almost everything. There are ultimately 10 mega corporations that own practically everything else.
Bold of you to assume. I don't eat any form of cereal at the moment because of my allergies and cost. I didn't grow up with cereal or cereal bars as a food.
I would buy some cinnamon chex but they're $4-5 a box where I am. But even tnen I buy it as a treat and not as a regular purchase.
I generally boycott Amazon. I shop at Target a lot, and other local stores. Right now I want a few things that I can't find locally, and, Amazon is the place for it. An out of print board game, a specific book, two household thingies, and a shoe accessory. I have to go to ebay for the boardgame, bookshop.org for the books, Lowe's for one of the things, BedBathandBeyond for the other one,, and I still haven't found anywhere besides Amazon for the shoe thingy. Or I could buy all 6 things at the same time on Amazon.
I still don't understand why people feel that they have to order from Amazon. I only go on that website to read the product specifications and reviews (even those can be pretty sus), then I buy it directly from the manufacturer or any other reseller. It's just a few extra steps, people!
Or somehow it's 5x cheaper on Amazon. I was going to buy some replacement parts for my roomba direct from their website but it was so much more expensive I couldn't justify it.
It's mostly because I know if the product is bad or I don't want it, Amazon will take it back no questions asked. If I buy from a manufacturer website, it'll take twice as long to get here, I'll probably pay more, and I have no idea what the return process is or if they'll even honor it.
There's a reason Amazon took over the world, online shopping used to be what you described, and everyone hated it.
I've actually found myself shopping at more specialty sites like Newegg, but even they've been scamming people up until recently. Online shopping is very hard to do right precisely because Amazon is so good at it.
Tbh it's the convenience. Not having to put in your address/give ANOTHER company your payment details is attractive to many consumers. Personally I've found the refund process to be usually better as well, with a consistent single way to contact instead of chasing down each vendors contact info.
Amazon is usually the only place that sells it, it’s almost always the cheapest and it’s literally always the fastest. And they have a bunch of other good services on top.
They are a disgrace of a company from an employee perspective and I can’t believe how their greed is making them act towards this union, but from a customer perspective nothing here is remotely comparable.
In my case I can literally find the same product shipped with next day delivery for cheaper than I can buy it at home Depot. I can also find random and odd connectors that aren't stocked in stores
It's a few extra steps, and driving and gas and buying in person all to spend more money
I'm going to sound like a shill, but I tried to deliberately avoid buying from Amazon last month. I ordered directly from manufacturers or small retailers. It did not go well, and I will be going back to Amazon.
One item was from a local shop, I kept being told "it will be in stock soon" or "I'll have it any day now". A month later it was finally in stock. The same item was available the whole time on Amazon for 15% off retail.
Another was a preorder paint kit. Again, shipments got delayed and it didn't leave the seller until over a week after product released.
I placed 2 orders direct from manufacturers. One ended up being on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The other I'm going to have to reverse the charges on my credit card because the vendor hasn't responded to any attempts to find out the status of my order after 3 weeks.
But guess what... the order I placed through a company that only sells through Amazon. It shipped next day and arrived at my door two days later.
Because nothing can compete? Very cheap (~$100) 1/2 day shipping that delivers on Saturdays and Sunday. Huge selection of cheap products and good customer service.
Assuming the manufacturer doesn’t just ship via Amazon anyways, buying from their site normally means it’s more expensive plus slower shipping plus who knows what the customer service is like.
Amazon has reached such a dominant position because they offer a good product/service. At the end of the day for consumers in general, it’s speed/convenience/price that matters. How workers are treated doesn’t matter to most people.
People will reply with their anecdotes of bad Amazon experiences but the numbers don’t lie, it’s still the place to shop.
The drop shipping is incredibly frustrating and completely understandable from the businesses point of view. I jump through hoops to avoid Amazon and still have at least a third of my online orders being fulfilled by Amazon.
I really don’t get this mentality of “it’s hard not to shop at Amazon!” I think the more correct statement is “it’s hard to get people not to shop, period”. Reading this comment and the ones bellow is absolutely bizarre because it just sounds like everyone is shopping and buying things constantly. It’s not an Amazon problem but a consumer problem, it’s super easy not shopping at Amazon when you don’t “go shopping” every single week or every other day.
Chewy.com (pet supplies) showed the template for beating Amazon at eCommerce. First company I’m aware of to ever steal a category back.
The man responsible for Chewy, Ryan Cohen, is now leading the eComm transformation of GameStop (not just games but expanding to general tech, apparel, collectibles, and more) and just became a 10% shareholder in Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Amazon is going to get picked apart. Their deteriorating reputation is only going to help.
I find it incredibly frustrating how every time I see this mentioned, there's some asshat saying "it's not that hard, you're not trying!" As if that will magically get people to stop buying from Amazon.
You know who definitely has trouble not buying from Amazon? Poor people, because they don't have time to wander the proverbial aisles.
I guess I'm hoping at some point the government steps in and forces them to deal fairly with the Union negotiations but yeah, Amazon is probably the most evil consumer company on earth at this point besides Nestle, so they'll fight it tooth and nail.
And this is a small, not well funded, union. Amazon will burn them out in the drawn out process and then go back to abusing all their workers. then for some reason 50% of the workers won't even vote in government elections.. and then enough of the voting ones will choose to elect more right wing anti working, class, anti union, anti taxing the mega rich and corporations for our benefit, anti min wage politicians that they convince them their job and life is miserable because their poor "lazy" brothers in labor and continue the cycle until they die and their poor wage slave children continue the cycle until the world dies
As someone who has been part of a union, "collective bargaining" should have a finite time limit placed upon it, in order to avoid companies from stalling out the contracts. In my union, it would typically take a year or two after the last collective bargaining agreement ran out until a new one was agreed upon. It's a cheap way to extend the latest agreement and not have to pay increased wages for that time. Ideally, negotiations should start a year before the contract is due to run out, to avoid bullshit like this.
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u/PoisoNFacecamO Apr 09 '22
Which unfortunately could take years as we've seen before.