The post where I talk about walls and Mexico without mentioning you-know-who Earlier this month, my girlfriend I visited San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. The AirBNB we stayed in north of the city centre was lovely, but I will admit some trepidation walking around the neighbourhood it was in. Many…
The death of brands? NYU professor and author Scott Galloway sees several trends that threaten consumer brands. Walmart and Amazon are in a never-ending struggle to lower prices, which means squeezing suppliers’ profits to the point where they can no longer afford the advertising needed to build a brand. Google search volumes for non-branded search…
Amazon is a dominant player now, but its birth was plagued with doubt and financial weakness, reveals the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone. Amazon started as an online book seller, and this was a canny move by Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder. Books were true commodities – all the same, no question of whether…
One. Billion. Dollars! Smart doorbell maker Ring just got acquired by Amazon for over $1 billion. This is after Shark Tank turned down the deal on their show in 2013. “Why cry over spilled milk when you know there’s another great idea coming through the Shark Tank?” Kevin O’Leary. Amazon’s new milk run Amazon is…
Sell on Amazon I think most buyers who select items on Amazon are scarcely aware that most of the product listed there is not owned by Amazon, but rather by third parties. Amazon has built an entire ecosystem around listing third party products and even storing and shipping third party products under its Fulfilled by…
Alexa, what’s Amazon up to now? “Much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface . . . quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.” Jeff Bezos Core operation: Web Services I explored this briefly before when looking at Amazon Web Services. Here, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is applying Principle 6 – Universality,…
In 2016, Amazon.com made more money from AWS, Amazon Web Services than from retail sales. Jeff Bezos approved the idea of experimenting with Amazon infrastructure in 2004, but AWS only became commercially available in 2006. In many ways, AWS is a refinement of the infrastructure that Amazon built for its own operations. Principle 6 –…