Why does Amazon want a new headquarters? Peruse the company’s RFP, and the company is frustratingly vague on the question. “Due to the successful growth of the Company,” Amazon says of itself in the royal third person, “it now requires a second corporate headquarters in North America.”
“It requires”?
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Every single company that dominates our digital life these days — oh hell, let’s just call it what it really is, shall we? Every company that dominates most of our life these days — Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple — these companies all were born as upstarts — challengers who fought against the status quo, founder-driven scrappers who discovered new paths, paths which led to their ultimate ascendance.
But now they’re dominant, they’re incumbents. And that means they care as much — perhaps more — about maintaining their power as they do about maintaining the level playing field which allowed them all to prosper in the first place.
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For a short item in a daily newsletter, my post on Google and Amazon’s feed-driven ambitions brought some outsized email responses my way. Suffice to say, people in the industry are paying close attention to the topic, and that got me thinking a bit more about where this all might lead. Given it’s Monday, and the news is a bit slow, indulge me in a bit of speculation.
Here’s the headline: I predict Walmart will attempt to either partner with Instagram, or to invest in (and partner with) Pinterest. Or both.
Read MoreAntitrust fights in the tech industry have always been problematic. Software is a “non-rival” good — additional copies cost nothing to produce, and one person possessing it doesn’t exclude another — so monopolies don’t feel like such a big problem, and the industry changes so quickly that monopolies tend to be fleeting. The last big antitrust battle in tech, the 1990s-era case against Microsoft, created a lot of sound and fury but mostly succeeded in distracting, rather than dismantling, its target.
Nonetheless, Amazon’s deal to buy Whole Foods has raised a whole new wave of antitrust talk — like this in-depth discussion in The Yale Law Journal, or this essay by Oliver Staley in Quartz that compares Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to John D. Rockefeller.
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Many companies enter the fray for possession of the coveted default seller position on Amazon pages — the seller you end up choosing when you click the big orange “buy” button — but only one can win. Since an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the sales for a given product page go to the winner, it’s a consequential choice. In Buzzfeed, Leticia Miranda lays out how this struggle has evolved, and what criteria Amazon uses to resolve it.
The answers are to some extent opaque: Amazon won’t detail its formula for fear it will get gamed, but says companies can win by “keeping prices low, updating their inventory, and offering multiple shipping methods and fast, reliable service.” Also, it helps if they are Amazon Marketplace veterans and if they ship from Amazon warehouses.
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Sometimes the day-two and week-two takes on big stories are more valuable to read than the breaking coverage. Here’s a couple of examples.
Before he became the icon of toxic management and bad-boss behavior that he is today, Travis Kalanick was, in the eyes of the venture capitalists who funded his company, the perfect startup CEO. He had the vision. He had the hard-charging spirit, the “won’t take no for an answer” stance, the “I’ll do anything to win” determination. As long as VCs value “manic, headstrong sociopaths,” we’ll be stuck with more Kalanicks, writes Adrianne Jeffries in The Outline.
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If you fear Amazon is about to swallow up the entire retail industry in its hungry online maw, this morning’s news that the company is buying Whole Foods will not reassure you. Amazon intends to pay $13+ billion to buy the high-end organic and luxury supermarket chain that customers love/hatingly refer to as “Whole Paycheck” thanks to its high prices (Bloomberg).
John Mackey, the Whole Foods CEO, would remain in charge of the business. In Texas Monthly profile published this week, Mackey vowed to stick to Whole Foods’ “conscious capitalism” mission despite pressure from equity investors to boost profits or sell the company.
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Amazon is the first destination for most US consumers searching for products online. For venture-backed startups building direct-to-consumer brands, Amazon is often an afterthought. They fear ceding any level of control over the brand narrative and customer relationship, the core drivers of brand value. However, it’s becoming increasingly perilous to ignore Amazon.
Consumer Influence
Read MoreNot transparency over the final price, but transparency over the pricing process?
It’s important to separate the two, because companies can exhibit one or the other, or both, or neither. Companies can change their approach over time as well. Let’s take a look at some quick examples.
Conventional wisdom used to be that the Internet would destroy middlemen. Middlemen, the thinking goes, don’t create any real value, only feeding off of the time or knowledge constraints of others. Once people had access to the wealth of knowledge and timesaving that the Internet provides, middlemen would cease to be valuable.
Marina Krakovsky argues in a compelling new book that conventional wisdom was wrong. The Middleman Economy argues that, while transaction costs have decreased for everyone, they have decreased at an even faster rate for professional middlemen, leading to have an even larger role in today’s economy. The book’s subtitle, “How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit” suggests that middlemen are both more ubiquitous and necessary than even most professionals realize.
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