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Becoming the Rainbow's avatar

Amazon is a little evil but not because it's a monopoly. It's evil because, unlike those small stores of yesterday that never had exactly what us shoppers wanted, it's not a physical place: we don't GO there. In some ways Amazon is an abstraction. It's like pulling out a credit card rather than handing over physical cash or chatting with "friends" on Facebook rather than having people over for dinner. In many ways the world is getting more and more convenient, better and better in objective terms, and all the while the brick-and-mortar interactions that make us human are silently slipping away.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

This is a much needed pushback, but of course there are plenty of "yes, but..."s available. The trade-off of democratizing business is that since there is very little barrier to entry, the share of the pie available for an individual business owner is much, much lower today than it was 20 years ago.

My perspective here is unique, for what it's worth: I was selling stuff online 20+ years ago, poorly but better than most. The easier it has gotten, the worse the opportunity to sell has become and the tougher it has become to make a profit. If you had published a book even 10 years ago, you might be much, much better off due to far less competition in the space... but on the other OTHER hand, maybe you would never have published at all.

On the third or fourth hand, the customer experience with Amazon is nothing short of incredible, and anyone who says they don't think so doesn't remember how things used to be.

Spot-on about their logistics business being paramount. I might include cloud computing here as well, and point out that they're slowly becoming an advertising business, further shifting away as a mere retailer.

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