This was Berkshire Hathaway, not Warren Buffet, despite the misleading title.
The problem is, megacorp with infinite capital get to make these massive mistakes and stumble through failure after failure, when everyday entrepreneurs get crushed for the tiniest problem.
My experience over the last year has been the opposite. More and more of the specialized bits and pieces I need or want are only sold online via Amazon.
Extremely depressing.
It's amazing how many times you buy direct from a vendor and then it comes via Fulfilled by Amazon.
The other issue is when anything goes wrong I've had a hell of a time with some vendors. It's a crapshoot - some vendors ship quickly and competently, and handle customer service like returns quite well. Others you might end up with your product not even shipping for a week much less arriving, even though the store says "in stock ships tomorrow". Due to this, when I really must have something on time or if it's a risky purchase I have a good chance of needing to return I tend towards just getting it with Amazon.
A lot of smaller shops simply don't want to deal with logistics and customer service - it's hard to compete on Amazon for shipping costs. And warehouse/returns/etc. is just a nightmare for a small shop. I absolutely understand why a small speciality manufacturer with a few dozen low volume SKUs would prefer to just use FBA and be done with it.
Not so much that it is hard, as that Amazon more or less forces vendors on its platforms to eat shipping costs.
Obviously, there are long term trends like the acceptance of credit cards that took place between the late 1970s and late 1980s in the US. But retail isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of innovation.
If you are thinking about other aspects of Amazon (obviously, AWS), then ... I can't comment on that.
Plus continuing waves of layoffs will lead to more frequent and longer AWS outages, and lower quality of retail products will hurt that side of Amazon.
Large stock sales always make headlines but they don't automatically signal bearishness or really anything else. After all what's the point of investing if you never realize gains?
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This brings back some (unpleasant) memories.
But otherwise I admire the minimalism.
AWS has been their real money maker, but also the explosion of AI and server farms has worked against them in threes ways: there is much more competition on infrastructure, the costs to run infrastructure keep going up, if you're looking for a growth industry there are other more appealing stocks now to park your capital.
The purpose is to get shoppers to look at more stuff and impulse buy.
I honestly believe search is bad for the same reason.
Net profit margins for retail are only around 3% across the industry.
Amazon isn't actually doing anything unusual in that regard. Retail is just a very low profit margin business whether it's physical or online.
These numbers are always confusing to those of us in the tech world where SaaS net profit margins are always very high.
You have to believe that Amazon is poised for much higher growth than they are to justify their current stock price.
Amazon’s huge 3p seller network means it can offer advertising as a revenue stream in a way Walmart can’t compete with.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu...
Even more so if you compare EBITDA:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=ebitda...
Why does Tesla have 15x the market cap of BYD, despite BYD selling more cars, having more revenue, and much faster revenue growth?
Because Amazon and Walmart are two different companies with very different product offerings.
Retail can only grow so far. AWS continues to grow at a relatively incredible rate compared to Walmart's business.
How many decades now have we lived in a world where the demand for investment far outstrips sane investment opportunities? In such a world, do stock prices have to be justified as you insinuate? And what happens when the prices are far higher than can be justified? I ask not rhetorically, but rather whether I should be hoarding shotgun shells and canned goods and hiding in the basement.
This is different from AWS where your reach is essentially "all of the internet" for anything that you launch. But this really just meant that reinvesting the revenue from AWS was harder for them to do, compared to revenue from retail. As a result, they didn't. Not nearly as aggressively.
You're right, but their retail business does support the bulk of their ad business which is extremely profitable. Arguably it might actually make sense for them to run their retail business as a loss leader to support their high-margin ad business.
You misunderstand the point of retail. It's now a marketplace where they use their name recognition and (alleged) consumer friendliness to collect fees from sellers. It costs to list, it costs to do FBA, and it costs to run ads so that your products appear in search results. Amazon ads is incredibly profitable.
That's also why Prime has such a grab bag of benefits. By keeping Prime membership sticky, the overall value of that marketplace supports the fees charged to sellers.
Despite controlling about 40% of US online retail, Amazon only has about an 8% share of total US retail. There’s still plenty of room to grow here.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...
Before Claude Code, a full cloud migration could easily be a couple months. We migrated our whole stack to GCP in about a week. It's trivial to switch clouds now with K8 stack and Claude Code.
I think Amazon netted something like $70 billion last year. What's the problem with them just staying the course and earning tens of billions of dollars in profit year-after-year-after-year?
Also, why would anyone want to work at Amazon at this point?
One of the worst companies to join with the worst margins out of the big tech companies.
Every friend I've ever had work for them was burnt out but stayed because they were too burnt out to look for a new job
xvxvx•1h ago
Guys, quit being so desperate. Concentrate on quality items at competitive pricing and fast delivery. Don’t turn into TJ Maxx.
My Echo, that I use solely to voice activating lights and switches, is now an ad machine and one bad day away from going in the trash. Next time you do a wave of layoffs, please include everyone involved in these horrible decisions.
evmaki•1h ago
I've been wondering if it is even possible for a publicly-traded company to deliver a voice assistant product without these incentives involved. I have to imagine the UX of these devices would be much different if they were built by a private company without the same market pressures. It would need to be self-contained and local, so that the infrastructure burden (e.g., data and AI in the cloud) wouldn't create a need for subscription service or data collection revenue to cover the cost.
vablings•54m ago
For those considering smart home devices, please just buy a home assistant device. It is easy for the non-technical and also not that much more expensive
drstewart•1h ago
vablings•55m ago
Amazon is pretty good at optimizing buying things but outside of that everything else sucks really bad especially on mobile
password54321•33m ago
HanClinto•23m ago
https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/the-local-first-...