Rivalry Building Between Amazon and Google 97
Amazon and Google, both giants in the online business world, started out as separate entities with two very different agendas. As each has grown into an empire, the overlapping areas of business between the two companies has grown as well. But with both companies moving strongly into the electronic device market, cloud services, and Amazon now building out its advertising network, they find themselves increasingly at odds, and 2013 may bring more direct battles."Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset. So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision," said VC partner Chi-hua Chien. Adds Reuters, "Not long after Bezos learned of Google's catalog plans, Amazon began scanning books and providing searchable digital excerpts. Its Kindle e-reader, launched a few years later, owes much of its inspiration to the catalog news, the executive said. Now, Amazon is pushing its online ad efforts, threatening to siphon revenue and users from Google's main search website."
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What do I care about their sales? I'm happy with their free app of the day. Most are crap, but I did manage to get Tetris on a day when it was free.
Amazon (Score:3, Informative)
"Pack of Four" (Score:3, Insightful)
While everyone is more interested in the rivalry of Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.
Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.
Re:"Pack of Four" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Microsoft has a near monopoly on Business servers.... Swingline sells a lot of Red Staplers too. Smead sells a lot of hanging file folders. 3M sells a lot of stickie squares.... Lots of companies have very profitable, near monopolies... But they aren't interesting to Wall Street anymore.
Microsoft has sold just about as many copies of Windows as they can.. On every possible platform. The only place they GROW is in XBox living room machines... But that's a really crowded market that the players are just taki
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Microsoft has a near monopoly on Business servers.... Swingline sells a lot of Red Staplers too. Smead sells a lot of hanging file folders. 3M sells a lot of stickie squares.... Lots of companies have very profitable, near monopolies... But they aren't interesting to Wall Street anymore.
Microsoft has sold just about as many copies of Windows as they can.. On every possible platform. The only place they GROW is in XBox living room machines... But that's a really crowded market that the players are just taking different sizes of pie.... There's NO NEW PIE being created. Apple and Google and Amazon are creating new KINDS of pie ... Microsoft isn't.
Cow pies.
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Microsoft has a near monopoly on Business servers
On what planet?
Jesus saves (Score:1, Troll)
That makes no sense.
Mircrosoft are simply the OS/Office Monopoly company that is a tax on every machine, you simply pay it as a business and get on with your life. Now compare and contrast with movers and shakers Amazon; Apple; Google; Facebook [the pack of four. Microsoft used to be a company that ate competitors for breakfast...now they are everyone bitch. People here often make reference to Ballmer throwing chairs..the sad reality is there is little wrong with throwing a chair we all lose our temper, what is wrong is after
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Your business could be built on IBM and RedHat products. Doesn't change the fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon are now the biggest players in the online services & marketing market.
Re:"Pack of Four" (Score:4, Insightful)
Our programmers and engineers still need a Workstation class laptop and Windows or Linux OS.
In a VM, which is where desktop Windows belongs.
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Really? I think you should pay attention to the actual world and quit listening to tech pundits who seem more concerned with shock value than fact. Facebook is in a fast decline and has been since before they went public. Microsoft is continuing to be fairly constant. My bet is that within 5 years (and I'm being liberal here with the time frame), Facebook is as relevant as myspace.
Microsoft failing everywhere. (Score:1)
Facebook is in a fast decline and has been since before they went public. Microsoft is continuing to be fairly constant.
Facebook is not in fast decline...its nearest competitor Google+ is still a ways of it threatening Facebook. Other than Facebook buying an Ad company. I have been astonished they have done *nothing*. As for Microsoft being constant, Google is getting serious about threatening their core product Office recently, while Microsoft failed in both search and mobile costing them Billions, and its new products Surface and Windows 8 have been disappointing they still print cash, but its for their undesirable utility
Big Market Cap (Score:1)
http://www.google.com/finance?q=FB [google.com]
Not really sure what your point is. In the context of this thread. Microsoft shares have been flat for years...and are down right now. Facebook raised a stack of cash from selling shares, overpriced at launch, nice! that is exactly what a company wants...its shares are up right now. I don't think they paint the picture you want them too. Personally I want facebook to do something interesting with the money its raised.
Re:"Pack of Four" (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.
Facebook isn't in the same league as the big boys.
Revenue for most recent quarter:
Facebook makes a lot of noise, but they're smaller than eBay, which had quarterly revenue around $4 billion, and about even with Yahoo.
Amazon is the company with room to expand. Amazon could potentially take over most of retail. Their real competitor is Wal-Mart.
The others are near the ceiling of their markets. Google has failed to make money with anything other than search ads. Microsoft probably has a long life ahead of it, like IBM, serving the needs of business. Apple has a price maintenance problem - their huge markups may not survive the flood of lower-priced devices. Facebook is in a bind; their user base has peaked, and shoving more ads at users didn't work out for Myspace.
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What ever happened to IBM? (Score:3)
Oh, yeah. Nobody ever thinks about IBM anymore. Even though they're about to knock Microsoft off their perch as "third largest technology company by market capitalization." IBM probably likes it that way.
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Amazon started spämming me heavily this Christmas - before that they sent me one email per month, now one every day or so.
I'll never ever buy anything from them.
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Their market is therefore far from being as consolidated as you imply.
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Microsoft not so much of a force today. (Score:1)
Facebook is still small time imo. The fact they have to resort to pushing some pretty shit ads (gambling, betting, etc) just to get their money says they're not getting it because it appears they're just pushing any ad to anyone. There is no intelligence behind it otherwise they'd realise I'd never click on an ad for gambling. The only thing they have is a large audience and some claim they have a lock-in since people have put their lives into their system but the same thing could have been said about MySpace. Microsoft is losing some relevance but at least they still have products that people need and won't be as happy to replace.
...ask Google who threatens them more Microsoft or Facebook.
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Facebook does indeed do advertising but given how many complaints there have been to how us
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"if Microsoft gets mobile devices right"
You speak as if Microsoft is a newcomer.
They have botched the job for 15 years now.
They would still be pushing WinCE 6.5 with minor tweaks if somebody else didn't show them how to make a real OS. And associated eco-system.
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"Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft."
In the slashdot world, maybe, but there is a huge place outside called "real world". You should check it sometime.
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"more resilient than that of any other" ? Come on, let's face it: the only resilient businesses are family-run businesses that have been doing the same thing for a century or so.
In the .com field even the biggest players can go tits up (or more likely: taken over by another company) if they make a series of stupid decisions. As for Amazon, I'd guess they do fine because they're well.. actually selling stuff. Like, physical items. And many of them (duh). Unlike companies that deal in virtual goods / servi
Define base... (Score:2)
Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.
I'm not going to say Amazon does not have a good base, they obviously do (I'm a prime member myself and plan to keep being so for a long time).
But Amazon has "only" 40 billion of cash on hand (or cash + cash equiv anyway). Apple has lots more than that. I would also say both Apple and Amazon have bases that are just as strong, with Apple having the slight edge overall simply because of the larger f
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Amazon has not been impressing me.
Netflix was down for over 24hrs due to a nationwide failure in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It came back up slowly in different places, but my area was dead last. Netflix even had their help page 404'd because of how many people were calling in.
Wasn't Netflix the one who came out with the platform to stress test your cloud infrastructure? ChaosMonkey? All that testing and disaster readiness did not seem to help all that much. Hard to make a difference when Amazon is down
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Amazon already has billions upon billions invested into infrastructure and Netflix would have to re-create that if they want any hope of handling 1/3 of the U
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Posted on a day where on of the biggest Amazon customers (Netflix) -- and all of their customers -- might have something to say about that "resilience".
Search or die (Score:2)
Re:Who the fuck cares? (Score:5, Funny)
I think banning humans would go a long way to solving the world's problems.
Re:Who the fuck cares? (Score:5, Funny)
I think banning humans would go a long way to solving the world's problems.
Skynet? Is that you?
Re:Who the fuck cares? (Score:4, Funny)
In little more than a blink of an eye we're going to experience the heat-death of the universe, where there will never be anything - ever, anywhere - again. And you want to talk about kids?
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only a fucking moron says this.
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The key is to keep the titans fighting... (Score:1)
For us, rather than working together to smash us down with their mighty clubs.
Keep at it boys, keep at it.
No news here... (Score:2)
This does not take a rocket scientist to figure out.
Lets call it competition (Score:3, Interesting)
The reality of the new world order, is the "pack of four" do have massive overlap in business, but that is just the way it should be. Its good old fashioned competition. Everyone has a store; Everyone had apps; Everyone owns an advertising company, Everyone has hardware [Ok Facebook only rumoured since forever, and Amazon new rumoured around a phone].
Personally I think the consumer needs to protected with cross platform; patent free formats, and the ability to move between devices as easily [and I mean Apps too] as possible to protect consumers from being locked into any one ecosystem.
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I guess I'm not much blown away by this. Companies looking for the big money go wherever the big money is.
Soon banks will be into banking, stocks,derivatives, commodities, overthrowing small countries, buying out large countries. You know, business as usual.
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Ownership of kitten Pictures (Score:1)
You do not really need patent free format. Just a guarantee that your stuff will be migrated,
...because I'm not happy replacing a Monopoly with a cartel! I really like your post, I was more focused on offline paid content [books; movies; Apps] forgetting that if anything there is as much content [yours and commercial] in the cloud, but I suspect caring Governments should be protecting "the people from themselves" as people do not seem to understand how much of their ownership over their lives they have given to these mega-corps.
Based on yesterday's Amazon AWS outage (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon AWS hosts Netflix and it was done for hours yesterday. Based on that I'd say +1 Google in the systems reliability front.
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Netflix has still not deployed any redundancy operations within AWS (e.g. multiple regions). AWS us-east-1 does seem to be less stable than others ... maybe because Netflix is soaking it dry? Or is it Netflix's doom to be using us-east-1.
Re:Based on yesterday's Amazon AWS outage (Score:4, Informative)
1 Netflix does use multiple zones:
http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-from-aws-outage.html [netflix.com]
2 US-East-1 is the default zone, and it is the largest zone. It may even be larger than all of the others combined. It consists of more than 10 datacenters in the VA area. It is also the oldest, and it's where Amazon launches new services first.
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If you'll read Amazon's comments at http://status.aws.amazon.com/ [amazon.com], you'll see that the problem was located and later resolved at Amazon. Netflix wasn't the only service affected.
Re:Based on yesterday's Amazon AWS outage (Score:5, Informative)
Right.. Google is NEVER down [techcrunch.com]
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No of course it is. Netflix though has a pretty terrible record. When it's down it's for a day.
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Once again we are caught in the middle... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't torrent. I bought programs from amazon unbox service. I thought paying $1.99 for programs was fair... OK, I have to wait until the next day because the broadcast networks/cable people have an anti consumer bent towards people "buying" media from them. I'll spare you the rant about the the people who watch the shows being the product vs the shows themselves.
What is hugely obnoxious is that Amazon is using its position to punish people. You can't get the amazon player for android even though you can get it for the Kindle (which is based on android) and surprise you can get it for the iPad. So none of the content that I paid for will work on my Nexus 7.
Now I just wait for the DVD sets to hit the library.
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there is an apk of the player that is on kindle floating on the pirate bay. go grab it and install it.
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I agree, any software from Amazon that is on their Kindle only, is certainly Questionable. and it does solve the problem, Do you not understand how computers work?
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Smart move Apple, giving people what they want, instead of stuffing your own services down their face.
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Smart move Apple, giving people what they want, instead of stuffing your own services down their face.
That worked so well with Ping and Apple Maps ~
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So far, Amazon still has a better track record of providing access to content obtained from them on others' devices. Kindle and Amazon MP3 apps are both available on pretty much every mainstream desktop and mobile OS, and some more obscure ones (heck, they have a WP7 app!). Instant Video is available on iOS. Furthermore, both Instant Video and MP3 let you download your files in a non-DRM'd format, multiple times at that, so that they can be played in any regular player - compare it to Play Music and Play Vi
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So none of the content that I paid for will work on my Nexus 7.
Funny, I watch Amazon Instant Video just fine on my Nook Tablet. Granted...I have to use the browser and no fancy app, but it does work. Have you tried watching Amazon through the web browser? Perhaps bookmark the page to make it one click away?
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This is why I *do* torrent. I'm perfectly happy to buy when someone will sell me what I want, but when they won't *I'm going to get it anyway*, let the anti-consumer business beware. If what I want is a video I own and can watch whenever and wherever, and keep in my personal archive, then I'm going to get it no matter what laws they buy or technical restrictions they try to enforce. There's nothing immoral about having it your way and I'm going to continue to vote with my economic feet by not buying from th
Ironic (Score:3, Insightful)
Recently as part of Googles defence against Microsofts smear campaign against "Shopping search monopoly" Amzason where given as an example of where 40% of shoppers go first.
Cyberpunk (Score:5, Funny)
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Advertising vs. personal info (Score:2)
Which is the more evil? Just advertising? Or stealing person info and selling it, or placing ads based on it?
Funny name (Score:2)
If only it were Chihuahua... chien is "dog" in French :)
Spread your data (Score:2)
Better yet:
1. Buy books at Barnes and Noble.
2. Use a Kindle Tablet.
3. Listen to music on iTunes.
4. Search with Google.
5. Use Microsoft Xbox for gaming.
6. Use Linux for the desktop.
7. Watch movies on Netflix.
Let's see the advertisers figure that one out.