Should we fear Amazon?

The Financial Times straddles the fence:
So: Amazon competes hard and invests heavily, just the things that make capitalism work as it should. Worries that Amazon is a threat to competition — and many people do worry about this — may therefore seem quixotic. The concern is that when the Amazon steamroller has flattened the industrial landscape, it will be free to raise prices and, more importantly, either crush or buy out any innovative rival to its established franchises.
To waive this away on the grounds that one day a new competitor will unseat Amazon, just as Amazon unseated Walmart, seems naive. Amazon has not only a huge edge in physical infrastructure, as Walmart once did. It also enjoys technological network effects to rival Microsoft’s and a trove of consumer data that would make Mark Zuckerberg blush.
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5 comments:

  1. E Hines1:34 PM

    Yeah, it's the End of Days. Prolly we should all just cut our wrists and get out of the way.

    Eric Hines

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  2. David Foster3:56 PM

    "It is hard to think of any other company in the modern era that could have that kind of impact on a market that it is not even in yet, just by the industrial equivalent of clearing its throat — not even IBM, General Electric, or Microsoft in their heydays."

    IBM, famously, could serious injure competitors just by announcing plans for a new model computer...models that, in some cases, were never even really built.


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  3. Grim4:18 PM

    Microsoft, too, used to reverse-engineer competitor's projects and include a free version of the same function in the next Windows update.

    I worry about how much data these corporate giants collect. But I don't trust the government more than I trust these corporate groups, and the government is the only tool that's likely strong enough to oppose them.

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  4. David Foster10:43 PM

    One problem is that when a company becomes big enough and especially high-status enough, state & local governments will fall all over themselves with special privileges to get them to locate in their bailiwick.

    100 companies employing 200 people each, or even 20 companies employing 1000 people each, will not collectively get the tax waivers, etc that will go to one prominent company employing 20,000 people.

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  5. Gringo12:57 AM

    What scares me about Amazon is Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Washington Post.

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