100%. It's also arguably the most irreplaceable. Just go through the thought exercise of imagining if a big tech company just vanished overnight. We'd all remember what they did and how the services work so companies could try to recreate the value proposition. This is how I imagine it playing out among the "Big 4."

Apple: If Apple vanished tomorrow I could get an Android phone that lacked some of the polish of iOS, but my day-to-day would be largely unchanged. Their laptops are still the best IMO, but could deal with a Lenovo if needed.

Google: Bing is fine. There are no shortage of online collaboration tools. Their dominance in AI is impressive, but it's not hard to imagine Microsoft reasserting themselves in Google's absence. Self-driving cars and life extension startups are well-capitalized. Their services are amazing, but not unique.

Facebook: Social media will find a way. If FB vaporized, something would fill the gap. Twitter would be given a new lease on life.

Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave. Who has the tech chops, willingness to deal with the grimy logistics and poor margins of retail, build out the cap ex of distribution, and deal with the politics of it all. Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech. If I had to bet on one of these four companies existing 100 years from now it would be Amazon without question.

Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

I already use Netflix for my video streaming. Spongebob is on Amazon Prime, so I watch that. I use YouTube, XBOX, and Google Play for other stuff (other videos, some movie rentals, games, music).

I use OneDrive for storing files on a company's servers. Works great.

I normally just get books from a bookstore or library. Tried a Kindle, didn't care much for it. Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

I don't really do food delivery, though I game the coupon system a bit with Blue Apron from time-to-time, since they keep sending me $30 off a delivery when I cancel. I mainly just go to the grocery store.

Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

> I already use Netflix for my video streaming.

To be fair, though, if AWS were to disappear your Netflix wouldn't work anymore. And given that it took them seven years [1] to move to AWS, I guess it would take them quite a while to move to Azure or Google or their own hardware.

For the logistics / shopping part I agree, though: I live in Switzerland, where Amazon doesn't ship much except for books and I have to say I don't feel I'm missing much. In fact, many local online stores which could develop because they weren't drowned by Amazon work better IMHO and at similar prices than the Amazon website.

[1]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

I seriously doubt Netflix wouldn't find some way to rapidly move to some alternative if AWS were to disappear. But by all means correct me if I'm wrong!

Agreed. If they go as far as randomly disabling AWS nodes to test their own resilience I'd be shocked if they didn't have some sort of contingency for if AWS went completely belly-up. Who knows, they could even have Azure nodes on standby in case AWS in its entirety went down?

Everyone should have a cloud provider total-outtage strategy. You should atleast control the ability to move DNS if everything in said cloud provider is out.

Well, your question is not uncommon for people having little experiences developing and operating large distributed systems.

But I can guarantee you, if Netflix can, they already did, so to make them in a position better negotiate price with AWS.

You seriously think there is a provider somewhere sitting on 20 empty datacenters with all the hardware procured and hooked up just waiting on an off chance Netflix might switch?

I don't think the AWS datacenters would disappear in thin air either.

Well neither would warehouses and other infrastructure they built but that was not the premise that is being discussed.

You realize most of Netflix is not in AWS right?

You realize that netflix is using up over 20% of aws capacity and as cool as having your own cdn is there is not much purpose in it without the part that runs on AWS.

The part that runs in AWS could just as easily run on bare metal. Stack Overflow does it, Backblaze does it, Github does it; I'm so disappointed in this tired trite that your a special snowflake running in AWS.

Yes it would run even better but it would take a few years to do the buildout.

Nothing is going disappear overnight.. AWS iaas services are commodity and not something so unique that are not replaceable with products from other cloud vendors

At Netflix scale they are not replaceable by other vendors because other vendors do not have enough capacity to accommodate Netflix migration.

Can you provide information as to how much capacity Netflix would need to migrate? Otherwise, this comment has no basis in reality.

there are estimates that netflix is consuming about 20% of AWS. AWS does not publish a list of DCs but from regions and AZs you can put a lower bound estimate at 40 so it would be anywhere from 8 DCs to whatever the upper bound is (I guesstimated 20)

Whatever mysterious force wipes all trace of Amazon from the earth might help Netflix find someone to run some servers.

> Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP, but I'm not familiar enough with it.

Sort of. If you are only ever using the basics such as EC2 and S3, then it is relatively easy to migrate. Use more services and it becomes a nightmare.

Heck, even with just EC2 it is already non trivial, think about a huge server deployment with a myriad of security groups and subnets that were fine tuned for years.

Indeed, AWS is still king. I doubt GCP or Azure would have anywhere near the capacity to handle all of the AWS customers. You're talking orders of magnitude, maybe 1000x? more compute power required - it's a different scale.

Judging by the Hacker News comments, it's google that has more capabilities than AWS.

If you follow comments about both, there are recurring ones of people who order 5000-15000 cores on Google for short computing intensive tasks whereas AWS didn't let them have thousandS. That forced them to switch.

I find that hard to believe.... 15000 cores is only 1000 16 core serversand my company has no problem with allocating those (300 per AZ) on a monthly basis, using them for a couple days and returning them.

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> Amazon is absolutely not irreplaceable for me, nor do I think it's irreplaceable for others.

I'm an avid reader, and I'd be seriously inconvenienced without Amazon. Selling books has become only a small part of what they do, but it's still the part I care most about.

Books are pretty much a commodity item there's plenty of places to buy books online and in person that aren't Amazon. There's nothing special about Amazon's books.

Sometimes I worry; I can't figure out how jet.com makes money shipping me 100 pounds of cat litter for no additional charge. I would think that the cost of shipping would be higher than what I paid for the litter.

gasoline is very very underpriced this days, it cant last,

>Azure is a perfectly suitable replacement for AWS - VMs, storage, functions, etc. So is GCP,

I started using just S3 in 2007, but fully moved my hosting on AWS by 2010. And never looked back. Their offering is the most mature, compared to competitors. And continuously improves, Few (random) examples:

1) They allow HTTPs breaking at the load balancer level, along with certificates you can just generate on the fly and use. Its so freakin' easy, you wouldn't believe, in comparison to, the process, if it was not there.

2) They keep on reducing prices on their own. As a customer you can't but feel glad when that happens.

3) Their DNS service (Route 53) is the easiest to configure I have seen. Having ran my own DNS, before it was released.

On top of that, there is a learning curve for any cloud. Which is as cumbersome as learning a new OS. Just like you will have to learn at least 10/20 commands before you can be productive on a new OS, same it is for cloud. E.g. How to build an image; how to spawn an instance; how to backup to S3; how to mount a volume; and so on...

Also the range and variety of instance types which you could get (memory intensive, compute intensive, from ultra small to the nxlarge ones)

There are also other reasons: Example, I tried to explore Google cloud, when it came out, but the sandbox model was not for me. So couldn't use it. I totally believe that its got better. But just my experience with it.

>but I'm not familiar enough with it.

You said it. If someone doesn't use mails, may equate gmail with Yahoo! mail or with Hotmail. Devil lies in the details.

edit: minor rephrase

> I normally just get books from a bookstore or library

Wow. Where do you live? I can't imagine being able to find 1/2 of the books I buy in any of the bookstores in San Francisco, for example.

otoh most "books" I buy these days are actually Kindle downloads, or on O'Reilly Safari.

There's plenty of other online retailers for physical books. Literally every book you can buy at Amazon you should be able to find somewhere else. And for digital books, there's other vendors there too (such as iBooks).

I avoid Amazon. I buy my books elsewhere and nothing Amazon has that I need can't be sourced somewhere else.

Name a single book you can buy on Amazon and not somewhere else.

You must have not looked elsewhere, I bought a whole series of decades out of print books and didn't touch Amazon.

>Jet.com/walmart is something I use already, and often prefer it to Amazon's own shopping. The website is cleaner which appeals to me. Shipping isn't quite as fast, but it's easily something I can live with. Half of what I get via Amazon doesn't ship via Prime, anyways.

This is an US centric view. There are very few services that ship worldwide, with such a large selection as Amazon, at more than reasonable prices, with two day delivery. Amazon is almost irreplaceable because they are the only ones that do it at such a scale. Aside from alibaba, but that means you are ordering in bulk.

Amazon is perfectly replaceable by the hundred of respective national competitors.

People might have switched to Amazon for price and/or convenience, they didn't forget the local past brand that served them for decade. In some places and some markets, Amazon is not even the leader.

I've used Jet and it's OK. The thing with Amazon is the 5% cash-back credit card you should be using with it, the ridiculous free shipping (seriously, I have no clue how they actually make money sending me a large box with $40 worth of stuff in it same-day), and the seriously easy returns or refunds if you need it.

One of the things about Amazon - they really don't make money. Actually, they are profitable, but only microscopically. All of that great stuff that we get shipped for free with 5% back costs a lot of money. The business model is to crush the competition then profit.

Worth reading about whether or not Amazon makes money:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/8/8/amazons-profits

> Truth be told, I'm not that big of a reader.

> which appeals to me

I think I can tell exactly what kind of person you are...

I think you are forgetting a big one. Microsoft.

If they were to suddenly go legs up today that would have unimagionable consequences. The size of their offerings and the amount of companies using their stack is breathtaking. Sure, except for their online services the stack would still be there, but the prospects of no more security updates would cause real problems and a slow but steady meltdown.

There would be scrambling like we have never seen before in the IT world. So much scrambling.

I'm almost linux-only, but I have to agree on that. Microsoft offerings look to me much more difficult to replace than Amazon's.

Do LinkedIn and Skype also disappear? Nokia? Mojang?

...I don't live in the MS stack, so I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable. Shake up to businesses that rely on Windows? Sure, but honestly I don't have troubles imagining another vendor (Apple or a *nix vendor or one of the OSes that are known and beloved to only a few) stepping in - after all, there's nothing special Windows offers. Frankly, I think this would be good - businesses have long lagged behind in be able to change because they are hampered by locked-in software limitations. My current office uses Google Docs and Gmail, and I was amazed by how little that causes problems. If MS were to vanish, I foresee a period of panic and pain...but more panic than pain, and of limited duration. In particular, assuming Windows didn't vanish, everyone would have time to deal with it. Lack up feature updates, lack of keeping up with standards, lack of security updates...MS has shown in the past that these can be survived, and while recent MS behavior has been better, I don't see "unimaginable consequences". Heck, there are still people running IE6! (very few, relatively, but 0.25% market share is still a lot of people!)

Then again, I've often noticed that being in or out of the MS stack is a bubble, and the other side sees things very differently, so I could definitely be wrong here.

The only reason Amazon vanishing would be significant is because there's not really a competitor in the whole of their space. online booksellers aren't doing online non-book goods delivery aren't doing cloud services aren't doing grocery delivery, etc. Each of those services would be easily replaced, but not by a single company.

>I'm unclear on why MS leaving would be so irreplaceable.

Government! Government and enterprise! Neither would function without MS!!

Windows/Active Directory, Windows Server, MS SQL server, SharePoint, and Office all make the world go round in the public and private sectors. You'd have to entirely replace pretty much all corporate infrastructure.

Sure! But not all at once (we're imagining the company goes away, not that existing software disappears, per above comments), and you didn't dispute that the products are replaceable, you just stated that they are in a LOT of use.

Coke and Pepsi together represent a huge share of the soft drinks people drink. If those two flavors, or even the two companies, disappeared, it would have a notable impact in that a lot of people would find new drinks (plus the significant impact to the supply chains, distributors, etc).

But there are absolutely competitors to fill in the gaps. There ARE other soft drinks. And if none of the existing brands are up to the challenge, in the absence of a huge established market presence, we can easily imagine new companies stepping up.

Just because MS products have a huge presence in the market doesn't mean MS products are irreplaceable.

If you're imagining the company going bankrupt but their technology still existing then Amazon wouldn't be an issue either. Someone would literally just take over their logistics supply chain and move right along. It's happened in the past, it can happen again.

I would dispute that active directory is irreplaceable. There is literally nothing on the market today that has the functionality and ease of use, and getting anything on the market today to that point would be about as easy as re-writing AD from scratch.

As I mentioned up-thread, the only thing "special" about Amazon is that there isn't a single competitor in ALL their spaces. Each space definitely has competitors that would step up.

My experiences with AD are anything other than "ease of use", but again, I tend to live outside the MS stack, and it's been 15 or so years since I did anything remotely related (I did a lot of interaction with some LDAP servers, but only interact with AD as an end-user...where I have weird issues like "must authenticate with a userId@domain that is not my actual email address at that domain" or "Have to look up everyone by last name, even though we have 50 Agrawals but only one Preetha" or "can't get a frigging email address without navigating into contact details, and that won't even work if it's a forward email from someone outside" (though that might be Outlook). Voicing these complaints gets me "oh, you just don't have a good administrator", but...just about every place I've been has had these issues, so either AD isn't that easy to use or everything else is REALLY bad.

I'm also uncertain what functionality AD has that isn't specific to integrating with the MS Stack, but that's a literal lack of knowledge, not a criticism.

Amazon doesn't have any competitors? They are literally Walmart or Target + leasing access to their IT infrastructure. Name one thing that isn't AWS that doesn't overlap with Target/Walmart. And AWS literally maps to Walmart IT and Target IT, they just aren't interested in competing in that space (and rightly so).

As for AD: An email address isn't an identity. I'm not sure why you would expect the two to match. I don't login to my mac with [email protected], I don't expect to login to my Windows laptop with [email protected] either.

The searching I can only surmise you were doing it wrong? I've never had an issue searching by first or last name in any tool whether it be the AD tools themselves or Outlook.

AD is a directory server, it can service a Windows environment or a Mac environment or a Linux environment. They've got a complete implementation of LDAP if you choose not to use AD auth on the client side. That being said: EVERYONE integrates with AD. Very few people integrate with anything else. I like having unified auth in my environment, perhaps you enjoy managing local hosts but that sounds disgusting to me.

If MS disappeared you would have billions of computers running an unsupported OS, running software that won't run elsewhere.

That all has to be replaced. That's billions upon billions in lost productivity.

> That all has to be replaced.

Yup...over time, just like it is ALREADY replaced over time. But let's assume I accept everything you stated without quibble.

I feel like we've lost the point of this thread. Yes, ANY large company vanishing would have a large impact. The more widespread the current influence of that company, the larger the impact.

But we weren't discussing "does MS qualify as a company with widespread influence". We weren't saying "I bet I can name a large company that could vanish without notable impact". Someone made the assertion that Amazon is somewhat unique in the results of theoretical vanishing. Even if Amazon ISN'T unique in this regard, the consequences of Amazon vanishing and MS vanishing are very, very different.

Um migrating from coke to Dr pepper doesn't cost anything.

Windows/Active Directory -- FreeIPA, Samba

Windows Server -- RHEL

MS SQL server -- PostgreSQL

SharePoint -- let it die, useless

Office -- LibreOffice, Google Apps

Um I never claimed there was no alternatives, I said that they were completely and totally ubiquitous in government and enterprise.

If MS stopped supporting their products it would be literally billions of collective dollars to migrate to alternatives.

I've been doing this a long time and in my personal observations I've noticed my corporate and (especially) government customers have been moving more into the Microsoft ecosystem than 10 years ago. MS is more important than they've ever been, if you can believe it.

It's not like everyone's deployments will just stop working if MS goes bellyup.

True, but given that they're moving towards 'Windows as a Service' it's not hard to imagine that happening someday.

Except for the Server OS. That's already built to be pretty standalone (aside from updates and collaborating with other Windows Servers). The idea here is that future security vulnerabilities aren't being patched which means it'd be open season for hackers once new vulns are discovered.

You should count yourself as lucky for not having to work in either public sector, higher ed or just plain old companies. ActiveDirectory + Windows servers disappearing overnight would pretty much send us back to the 1980s with how prevalent it is.

But the implication of the above comment was not that the programs would disappear, just the company. (I mean, any online authorizations would die, but I didn't think that was part of daily routines, just installations. Though I really know nothing of MS business-type servers (SQLServer etc))

...and I'm desperately trying to hold in comments about the small difference in performance between 1980s and MS software - I honestly blame Outlook for how the world killed email as an effective medium.

Though I do count myself lucky to have my current job. I've worked public sector in the past, and recently started up a 2nd (part time) job at a university that involves using Outlook. It is quite painful.

count yourself lucky, you could be using lotus notes

Highly prevalent != irreplaceable (though it might be a prerequisite). The fact that so many businesses/sectors use MS technology is what makes them one of the "Big 4." However, there is nothing irreplaceable about those technologies. Another vendor/technology could replace them if those businesses were forced to change due to MS disappearing.

There are many companies built on a .NET stack. They will all have a terrible time if Microsoft vanishes. Most will probably vanish with Microsoft.

With any sense, those companies would band together and invest in expanding .NET core into doing what they need.

These companies have no interest in getting into that business. That's why they pay microsoft large sums of money to do it for them.

Yeah, but we're talking about a doomsday scenario when Microsoft disappears overnight. They'd rather invest in a new .NET than have to rewrite their entire stack.

Depends on if Xamarin emerges from the ashes or if they disappear along with the rest of Microsoft.

Uh, what? Amazon is competing with retailers, so if Amazon goes away you'd buy from other retailers. In a big city get your books and music from local independent booksellers and record stores (in the country or for esoteric things you get them from alibris and discogs). Electronics you can get from Best Buy, Target, Wal Mart, Newegg. Or you can go to a secondary market for all the things, a little company called "eBay".

Why do I know this? Because I don't use Amazon anymore at all for anything after they blatantly screwed me over as a seller.

Sometimes I feel like engineers on HN have centralization on the brain. We are so impressed with scale and complexity of Amazon! We forget this size and complexity arose because it's trying to compete with (and presumably supplant) an enormous, biologically evolved distribution and retail ecosystem.

If Amazon dies, we all simply go back to that ecosystem, like I did, both online and real life. (And you know what? It's better. Newegg is better for electronics because they only do electronics, and they fight patent trolls; Alibris is better because they have a better selection, better prices, and support local business; Discogs is better for the same reason; all are better because they are focused.)

" In a big city get your books and music from local independent booksellers and record stores"

Except in many cities, many of those went out of business in large part because of Amazon. Amazon is still often more competitive compared with those that remain, from a price/shipping perspective.

That's a vague claim, but such as it is, it rings hollow. Actually, it sounds like a rationalization for using Amazon (which is easy) instead of looking around for a local alternative, and going there (which is hard). I've recently travelled fairly extensively through the US and every city of any size I visited still has a handful of independents, and they are doing okay, if not great.

The next time you want an album, instead of opening up iTunes or Amazon, I suggest opening up google maps and typing in "record store", and then going there.

> I suggest opening up google maps and typing in

Why use an online service like that when there are perfectly good printed maps out there? Mate that up with a printed yellow pages and you're all set.

That is unfair and hurtful, Chris. I'm encouraging people to support local business, not because I'm a luddite but because I don't want to see local business starved to death by global megacorps. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm pointing out a harder option, and in good faith. I'd appreciate it if you'd be open and clear about any objections you might have to this, rather than resort to sarcasm and innuendo. Thanks.

Looking back you are right: I'm sorry. I was initially amused at the use of one technology over the other as being okay but I see your point. Thanks for responding and setting me straight that the reasons for doing so are important.

Amazon being irreplaceable is not something I can agree at all with, living in Europe. I bought a book or few here and there and that's about it. AWS can be replaced, and is all the time. That's about it. Now, Ebay and paypal on the other hand...

Also, Google is more Gmail and youtube to me than google.com. How are you going to replace that easily? Especially youtube with so much content now.

twitch would replace youtube. bing for search.

How would you replace youtube without its content though? That's where it's at.

People would port stuff over.

My bet would be on vimeo, not twitch.

Vimeo is amazing when their player doesn't suck.

Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave

Absolutely true. Only some weird merger of Microsoft/Walmart/FedEx can perhaps replace Amazon. In my head, Amazon will be the first trillion $ company.

Why the said companies need to merge at all? Why not obtain specific services from all three separately?

Agreed. There is no need to merge. I was just making a counter point from an entity/conglomerate perspective.

Yeah when I think about it, Amazon is only going to get bigger. Even Twitch, I think, is only scratching the surface of what it will become.

Excellent comment! I disagree about one thing though: I think, at least here in Holland, Google would be missed quite a bit more than Amazon. I don't know anyone who uses Amazon, so them disappearing wouldn't have too much of an effect on my world.

Google, on the other hand, is a crucial part of the lives of many people around me. Almost everyone I know uses Gmail, and Google Docs (spreadsheets, etc.) are not only used all over the place by various people collaborating, but often crucial parts of the infrastructure of many of their business. Everyone I know who has tried other search engines keeps coming back to google, about half of my friends are on Android phones and use google calendar and their assistant.

Basically, Google seems to have multiple tentacles into each and everyone I know. Amazon, in contrast, is a 'web shop' that most of the people I know don't even use because there are local, more popular alternatives (Bol.com, for one).

I suspect if Amazon went under, the businesses relying on their cloud services would panic, but just move to another service. Google, on the other hand, would be sorely missed by tons of people in tons of small and big ways.

I used to live in Europe and would agree with you 100%, but now living in the Bay area Amazon is a key part of life almost. I have tried to stop using them a few times but it is just ridiculously convenient and cheap. Order something and have the almost always cheapest option on the door today or tomorrow.

Another reason for this is that going to stores is a serious hassle here. When I was living in London and even NYC I just walked to the stores instead, but in gridlocked suburbia that is almost not an option.

> Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech.

I disagree, Amazon is the only big player which have yet to master the international market. I live in Europe and there are plenty of small players here which offers similar or better deals with faster shipping so most don't even bother with Amazon. Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are as dominant as everywhere else though.

Amazon can't even master localizing to their nearest neighbour in Canada. Amazon music and video are still not here, over 10 years after the rolled out in the US. Their online shopping offerings are not as in depth here. Their Canadian presence is an after thought, and is arguably one of the easiest localization efforts to undergo.

Compare this to Apple who, when they decided to bring iTunes outside of the US launched it almost simultaneously across a huge number of locales.

IMHO Amazon is already losing ground in areas it has only recently tried to stick its nose into. And its online marketplace has started to suck, started to fill with dubious merchants with prices all over the map.

I agree that Amazon in Canada is not as good as in the US but we do have prime video now (primevideo.com) and, at least in Vancouver we now have 1 day shipping which is amazing.

Wal-Mart, probably. They bought Jet.com, which is effectively Amazon retail. I've tried it and it works just fine.

Amazon's definitely the 900 lb gorilla of convenience, but the BATNA of simply not using them is not really a material concern for the normative middle-class consumer who can drive to Target.

Walmart would replace Amazon. Not over night, but I'd say less than 5 years to fill the online void.

> 100%. It's also arguably the most irreplaceable.

As an Australian who doesn't have access to Amazon, it's easy to imagine Amazon being replaced.

If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, my work as an ops person will become a joy. I truly cannot imagine any other vendor being this shitty and in business. Home life is already a joy (and a lot less expensive / cluttered) because that relationship has already been severed. I can't think of a tech company I'd miss less. Not to mention how good it'd be for competition and quality in the retail and especially in the cloud computing business.

> I truly cannot imagine any other vendor being this shitty and in business.

I see you haven't used Softlayer

Wait, so you are saying that having the most innovative competitor (in the retail space) would be good for competition? Maybe for THE competition, but surely not the consumer.

I'm definitely NOT talking about the most innovative competitor in the retail space because I'm talking about Amazon. What I'm saying is that if Amazon disappeared, the retail space would be more competitive. I highly doubt that is at all controversial.

I guess the UK is such a compact market that most ecommerce plays are easier compared with larger markets so Amazon's "USP" is simplicity rather than uniqueness. I could get a decent number of products from Argos the same day, my food (/homewares) delivered in a 2 hour window the next day from any number of suppliers (and if rumours are true that the aforementioned Argos might merge with a supermarket, challenger right there).

Their main benefit is in selection, price (that isn't quite as dominant in some things as it was - although it's potentially going to destroy their competitors before they themselves match Amazon) and having a slick checkout process with all of my info in there.

Obviously this is why they're focusing on own-brand, specialised products and selling infra, but then do we see a day where Amazon has its fingers in so many pies in such a big way that they have to be broken up?

> Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave.

Well then there's the Chinese version.

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/alibaba-already-bigger-faceboo...

You're really underestimating the power of markets if you think any company is irreplaceable. Copying/replicating is a lot easier than doing something for the first time.

My personnal experience mirrors your for the first three points but I wouldn't miss amazon because I only ordered twice from them. Which goes to show that any of these points could be irreplaceable - or not - for anybody.

I agree with you final stance though, that Amazon is highly likely to be still around in 100 years unless they are back to square one with everyone else if an energy crisis (oil, transport, etc.) crushes us all.

Meh, I know I am anecdata, but I don't use them that much, maybe once every 6 months for a book or something. I know some people use them every day, but I just don't and don't really ever see myself doing so. I mean, it just isn't hard at all to pick up the stuff I need/want from the store on the way home*

*Caveat: I live in the suburbs of a larger-ish city, not in the rural areas of the world.

> Amazon is the most untouchable, irreplaceable company in tech.

100%, yes. Totally agree! And it is probably a very non-ideal situation to be in from the customer POV. For example, Amazon ate up the .book TLD away from consumers and very few eyebrows were raised. Their strength and position in business is an impressive thing to talk about until someone at the top decides to flip the switch. ;)

It's not only about the services these companies provide but the data that they currently hold. I would hate to loose all my Google docs overnight or all my Facebook photos. Sure, you can regularly back things up, but there's no guarantee that importing those backups on the replacement service will be painless.

>"Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave"

So you would make do with substitutes to deal with Apple, Google and Facebook disappearing but if Amazon disappeared you can't imagine yourself or others walking into a store to buy goods?

Well, part of the reason I use Amazon is how little free time I have.

Amazon has lots of stuff that I either can't find elsewhere or don't have the time to go and purchase in-person.

>Amazon: It's almost impossible to imagine any company filling the gap they would leave...

My local grocery and book stores?..

Some another cloud provider for hosting?..

It'll be very hard to replace the _combination_ of services Amazon provides. The separate services by themselves are hardly unique.

Walmart

Walmart is going to build the largest hosting company in the world?

MS already have Azure which would fill the gap I'm sure. There's also Google cloud compute.

Dont forget their early adoption of database technology led to their rise.

That's interesting – I actually hadn't heard that before but it makes for a notable story. Got a link?

If you're a tech company, and your stack is so tightly coupled to Amazon that it represents an existential threat to your server fleet, you were never going to make it anyway.

Because Netflix could migrate over night, right?

Yes, they should have a contingency plan to bring things onto another hosting provider within 1 or 2 days. Anything else is negligence from a business continuity perspective for a company that size.

Companies plan for utilities to go out, which don't even have competition. It's insane to operate just hoping Amazon doesn't get hacked, freeze your account, experience a catastrophic failure, or just decide to quadruple the price overnight.

If uptime has any relevance to your company at all, have (and test!) a process to move everything to another provider in a mostly automated fashion.

They do not have the international scale of Amazon. Walmart is non-existent in a lot of countries.

So? It's not like there's no online retail in those countries. Amazon is fighting the good fight against local retailers which will thrive until a 'replacement' comes along. I'm pretty sure Europe will not miss Amazon that much (not as much as the USA).

I just searched for how much does Amazon sell outside of North America (which granted, includes Canada and Mexico) and it was about 40%[1].

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Amazons-revenue-com...

while it cannot completely fill the space, people never take ebay seriously. the amount of stuff I can buy there shipped free or just in total cheaper than Amazon makes it worth my time to cross shop.

what keeps me off other 'retailer' sites is merely how badly some are implemented, from clutter to just outright being buried under items that are listed but you cannot get in your area.

Alternatives outside the US / Euro centric HN perspective: Alibaba et al.

Amazon: Alibaba/taobao

What people also don't seem to realize is that the US has serious anti-monopoly laws on the books (even if enforcement has been kinda lax lately). Remember Microsoft in the 90s? With Amazon running many competitors' infrastructure (e.g. Netflix is on AWS, FBA shenanigans etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if it got hit with some legal action aimed at breaking it up at this point.

What was the end result of the MS anti-trust stuff? Clearly they weren't broken up; did it have much of an impact on their business? I assume some fines were paid after a long appeals process?

It's hard to make a good argument that amazon is (or could be) a monopoly. It's more like google or Walmart where they're just really big and their scale makes them hard (not impossible, maybe unrewarding) to compete with.

How do you think google, apple and this batch of companies exists because Microsoft wasn't able to bundle its way to success in those markets.

The result of the 2007 antitrust case was that microsoft could not ship IE anymore, but instead had to offer users a dialog offering to install chrome, firefox, IE or others from 2010 on.

This was part of why Chrome quickly rose after that. The other part was that Google became anticompetitive.

Chrome didn't exist until 7 years after the case was decided and settled.

Yeah, Netscape was the main browser impacted by the Microsoft anti-trust case.

(The Netscape source code -- released in part because Netscape was dying --if I recall ended up forming the basis of Firefox, so it's fair to speculate "what ifs" if the Microsoft anti-trust judgement was more swift.)

> Google Chrome is a freeware web browser developed by Google.[11] It was first released in 2008, for Microsoft Windows

> BrowserChoice.eu was a website created in March 2010 as the result of the decision in the European Union Microsoft competition case. The case involved legal proceedings by the EU against Microsoft and found that, by including Internet Explorer (IE) with their market-dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft had used their dominance of the operating system market to also create a dominant market position in the web browser market.

I’m confused, what are you trying to say? Chrome didn’t exist until 2017?

The case referenced by most US commenters would be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

I've never known whether European antitrust (or privacy) action against companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook has had significant global/US effect. Do you (or anyone else) know of a good source on this?

Ah okay – I’ve never heard of the US antitrust case, so I don’t know what effects it had.

Regarding effects of BrowserChoice, Opera had some statistics: https://web.archive.org/web/20111209114445/http://my.opera.c...

Mozilla also reports how much they lost due to BrowserChoice not running for a while – BrowserChoice had almost doubled their overall download rate: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-lost-6-9-million-downlo...

Monopolies are ok, anti-competitive behavior from monopolists is not. I think the only thing I've seen that looks anti-competitive from Amazon is when they stopped selling (some?) TV devices without support for Amazon Prime Videos.

They've done a bunch of anti-competitive shit with ebooks, but the DOJ has adopted the really fucked-up position of "if prices are low for consumers, then it's ok", even though Amazon is clearly abusing their dominant position in the ebook market repeatedly in order to squash competition in ways that have been clearly found to be illegal in the past.

Amazon has done some stuff that smells anti-competitive. For example... where did all the product listings go from this sellers profile? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/node/index.html?ie=UTF8&me=A2RFSIF...) They seem to have all disappeared the day after thanksgiving last year....

I heard through the grapevine that in the marketplace agreement, that you must list all products from all channels you have a presence in with the amazon channel to stay in compliance.

why would they do that? Oh probably because Ma Bell uses that data to target which products they want to compete in from their eCommerce company.

How about anti-dumping laws? How is that applied in the US?

Isn't "burning money until you kill competition" inherently illegal?

I assume Uber has the same issue.

Maybe some people think monopolies are OK but the law says they aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act#Original.... Are you suggesting a legalization campaign for monopolies?

I think you are mis-interpreting the Sherman Act. Monopolies are not illegal -- from further down in the article you linked to:

The act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct, which generally consists of conspiratorial conduct of the kind forbidden by Section 1 of the Sherman Act, or Section 3 of the Clayton Act.

The FTC also has more information: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

There's nothing in the FTC link that says monopolies are not illegal. In fact they say this:

> The Sherman Act outlaws [...] any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize."

If you look at any felony e.g. selling hard drugs there are always mitigating circumstances and exceptions - but they don't invalidate the general rule. The text of section 2 is pretty clear that monopolies are generally illegal.

I'll try this again. Section II makes "monopolization" illegal, which is different than being a monopoly.

From the DOJ: Monopolization requires (1) monopoly power and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

I'll try again to restate the big picture and see where we disagree:

- monopolies are illegal since 1890

- excepting natural monopolies (utilities), which are strictly regulated instead

- since the 1980s, also excepting companies that keep prices low for the end consumer. This is the space where Walmart, Amazon and Uber have grown. But, if they try to raise prices substantially OR if enforcement guidelines become more strict again (b/c politics), these giant companies can get into giant legal trouble (see: break-up of AT&T).

Are we in disagreement an any of these points? If you think unregulated monopolies were OK before 1985, can you give any examples? Same for post-1985 unregulated monopolies that raised consumer prices?

I disagree with the very first point. Monopolies are not illegal in the United States. Monopolization is illegal, but the legal definition of monopolization is not "being a monopoly."

If it were illegal to be a monopoly, no firm could ever invent a new product category as they would be a monopoly in that market. There's a hundred years of case law supporting the fact the being a monopoly is not illegal. The US v. Grinnell is one of the big ones, and quoted in the DOJ page I linked to.

https://www.quora.com/When-and-why-were-monopolies-outlawed-...

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-oligopolies-legal-if-monopolie...

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

https://www.wired.com/2012/10/antitrust-is-supposed-to-prote...

http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/

As another example, Microsoft was found to be a monopoly and to be monopolizing. The result of the case was not that they had to stop being a monopoly, it was that they had to stop the unfair and monopolizing business practices.

> Monopolies are not illegal in the United States. Monopolization is illegal

Next up: the 18th amendment did not implement Prohibition, since it still allowed alcohol consumption; it merely forbade obtaining it.

The links present a unilateral view of the issue, mainly from lawyers defending big companies. Here's the other side from our longest serving Justice, William O. Douglas [1]:

"We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness shows how size can become a menace - both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace - because of its control of prices. [...] That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it."

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/334/495.html

How many utility companies can you get to provide electricity to your house? In the vast majority of the US it's just 1.

You are correct that natural monopolies are allowed to exist under US law, but the trade-off is that they're strictly regulated. Each state has a utilities commission, usually appointed by the governor.

I think it'd be a good idea, but let's not pretend that any of us need to push for that. The monopolies are perfectly capable of hiring their own lobbyists.

> What people also don't seem to realize is that the US has serious anti-monopoly laws on the books

Not true. At all. We have a weak Anti-Trust law that most Justice departments are squeamish about enforcing.

The laws are very strong. Back in the day, they would block a merger if it affected 7% of a market, and vertical integration was a big no-no. None of those laws have been repealed. The enforcement guidelines were weakened during the Reagan administration (a big factor in the rise of e.g. Walmart) but they're still strong enough to block plenty of mergers and allow the occasional Sherman Act prosecution. I agree with you that it's a lack of political will, but politics has been very unpredictable lately.

A weak law is not the same as an unenforced strong law.

An unenforced strong law can become enforced essentially overnight and wipe out those violating it.

Does monopoly law apply when they have healthy competitors in every sector? This has seemed to be the escape hatch for the large tech companies: go do everything, not just eat one sector.

One area where anti-monopoly law seems vague to me: does law clearly define what a market is?

Like, MS got hit for leveraging their 'OS market' monopoly to break into the 'browser market', even though they are both pieces of software.

If you draw distinct markets aggressively enough, then everything is its own market and many companies are monopolists in their own narrow niche.

Also, what if technological changes turn two originally separate markets into a unified entity -- should it be anticompetitive if a monopolist does that?

This wiki article does a pretty good job at explaining how the "relevant market" gets determined in competition law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_market#Definition_and...

The article lists demand-side and supply-side substitution as 2 of the 3 key factors, which basically means 'if a monopolist changes the price in this product, how much does it affect supply or demand in the other product', and then says that products at exhibit substitution are in the same markets.

The problem with these definitions as applied to the tech industry in particular is that oftentimes the 'price' the consumer pays is non-monetary.

For example, should Google's dominance in the search industry preclude it from cross-promoting its other services?

If both search and also the product it's cross-promoting are free, how should courts go about figuring out whether that's ok?

Presumably Google is getting paid in data, and is turning that data into money via Ads, but the actual accounting of how much that data is worth is only something that Google has access to -- and then to see how this works for competitors, the court would also need the proprietary internal numbers for them too.

There is still real competition in the cloud computing space, though. Plus, it's a hard sell that Amazon has done anything with AWS that is anti-consumer or monopolistic. The benefits to consumers are clear, and I don't think there's any reason for regulators to come after them right now.

For the moment they are maintaining / gaining market share by offering a better service. As long as it will be the case I would be surprised if they run into anti-trust problems. When they start abusing of this dominant position, then troubles may come.

>"I've said before on hackernews, but people never seem to grasp the scope of Amazon. They aren't an e-commerce website anymore; that's just the tip of the iceberg"

I don't think this is some kind of special perspective that you have from working there. I think people seem to grasp their ambitions pretty well. Their fleet of planes, the delivery drones for last mile, Alexa, Prime Pantry, AWS etc, all of these developments have received good coverage in mainstream media.

It is impressive.

Do you think there's a chance of decline if Bezos leaves and the next Ballmer comes along? Profits up, but ultimately company declines and lets competitors eat it's lunch?

I don't.

Amazon is successful because of its fast moving, demanding culture. No product is ever left to coast - everyone is pushed to be bigger, faster, cheaper, etc. Amazon realizes this, and does a lot to reinforce its culture internally. They do an excellent job of this, even in remote offices. I think Bezos has done a terrific job of building something that will succeed without him. And that's a good thing for him - he's free to play with space travel, now.

The culture is really pervasive at Amazon. Bezos started it, but now that the pinwheel is spinning, he doesn't need to do much to keep it going.

His major replacement potentials are Andrew Jassy (AWS CEO) and Jeff Wilke (CEO of Consumer, ie e-commerce and logistics). Both of those guys have done a fantastic jobs in the business they are in. I don't think Amazon would want to pull either of them into a roll of owning both though, lest they lose focus. I suspect they'd break them off as separate sub-companies (like Alphabet/Google did), and put someone else as the CEO of the overarching company.

Are you sure this isn't purely a perceived decline? Microsoft's stock is the highest it's ever been and they made a profit of $52B in their last fiscal year.

I think that's mattmanser point. Profits look great and the stock price is happy, but mindshare in the consumer space, and perceived innovative edge (see the huge miss on phones)

Yes, definitely still a great company, but they've lost their complete dominance.

They made $16.7 billion in their last fiscal year, and 2015 and 2016 represented their lowest profits over the past 10 years.

You're using a non-recurring charge to try to make a wider point.

2015 had a $10 billion non-recurring, non-cash charge. Without that, your entire premise collapses.

The easiest way to poke a giant hole in what you're proposing, is to look at cash production from operations, which is the ultimate gauge of profitability. Their cash production the last two years is not the lowest over the past 10 years.

Net operating cash flow for 2016: $33 billion. Higher than 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

True. There are also much larger capital expenditures, and dividend payments.

I think Microsoft is doing tremendously well under Satya Nadella. I was making no other point except that the parent poster's comment about income were incorrect.

Low profits tend to happen in the first years of a transition to subscription. See Adobe for another example.

That risk will always be there. But it seems like he has built a culture that will allow it to continue onward. If you think about it, Bezos is not like Jobs, where the latter had an outsized impact on deciding what things Apple would or would not make.

Do you own any Amazon stock after having worked there for that period of time? I'm not a finance guy, at all, but that's the one company I've always considered putting a couple bills into and root for.

Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K...

> Do you own any Amazon stock after having worked there for that period of time

Amazon pays SDEs about 1/4 of their income in the form of RSUs, vesting twice a year. I joined at $187, and sold my shares over time to cover various expenses (wedding, house downpayment, sold the last ones for an upcoming kitchen renovation).

> Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K

Here's the thing... when you buy and sell stocks directly, you are implicitly competing with professionals at the game of 'what is the stock actually worth?'. The professionals you play against do nothing all day but analyze the stocks they've made bets on, build models, look at data, read reports. You might beat them by luck in the short term, but they'll beat you in the long-term at this game. You're both gambling, but they know the true odds better than you do.

My recommendation: Use a robo-advisor to spread your money over a diverse set of ETFs and auto-rebalance them. My friends are early employees over at WealthSimple (google them), a start-up that does this. Or read what it is their robo-advisor does, and do that yourself to save the 0.5% fee.

Didn't see this over the weekend, I wish I had. I did look into some different investing tools a couple months ago, but got intimidated by them, especially the ones that round up your purchases as you have to give them access to your checking. I really just wanted to get my feet wet with something smart and small at first. I'm not wealthy, but given the chance to learn I feel that I could be successful at it. I'll give your recommendation a chance.

0.50% (50 bps) is excessive.

If you don't want to do yourself but still want the benefits of rebalancing (and tax-loss harvesting), suggest checking out Wealthfront (https://www.wealthfront.com/) instead.

It's high for America, low for Canada. Afaik, WealthFront haven't opened a Canadian arm yet, while Simple are based here.

Interesting points and Amazon is a great company not disputing that but the older I get the less I want. My spending on Amazon has fallen over the last 18 years to so little I am thinking about dropping Prime.

AWS is in a competitive market with Google, MS, etc.

Logistics are more self serving for Amazon in my opinion. I'm under the impression their planes are used to move fright between US Hubs and maybe to bring higher dollar freight from China instead of 2 weeks on the water. Walmart already leases (and has for years) it's own container ship. It's on a 1 month month cycle out of China. Container ships typically sail out every Friday night out of China. Spend two weeks loading and 12 days on the water to US and Canadian ports. So Walmart still uses others to ship freight. The last mile for delivery is also competitive, USPS, UPS, FEDEX, DHL, etc, aren't going to sit still. Trucking is incredibly competitive industry. Most fright moves by rail coast to coast with trucks picking up at regional terminals. There is still a lot of long haul but it's more expensive. A full 52ft trailer from NY to TX can run around $1700, it's the LTL where most Truckers make their money. I was under the impression that Amazon leased trailers and didn't lease any tractors. Giving private operators contracts to haul.

No cash register stores might be a hit with some folks but price is really important to a lot of America if you have a family. I also wonder if RFID ink could be used for bar codes where you just push your cart through a reader portal and it scans the whole cart at once. No lines and seconds to check out with just the bagging to do.

I appreciate what Amazon has done. They basically made anyone they compete with become more efficient. Quite the driving force and fantastic for the consumer. Lets hope they continue.

My vote would've been "US Robotics" from "I, Robot". They have arguably the best virtual assistant on the market, Alexa. Paired with their expertise in automation, I'm imagining a future where Amazon robots would do the vacuuming, wash dishes, and do my laundry. (And of course order more cleaning supplies from Amazon, when I get low.)

You say it in a tongue and cheek manner but I feel letting corporations getting this big is quite dangerous and will be the death of democracy.

The breadth they are reaching really is impressive. The only other company which can really be compared with is Google and Microsoft. So far, Google's relationship with Amazon has been very weird, I'm curious to see how it evolves over time.

Let's not kid ourselves. Samsung and the other Korean chaebols, Mitsubishi and the Japanese keiretsus or even 3M have at least similar breadth.

Absolutely, but those are rarely discussed. I don't really get why, all of the firms you listed are incredible.

Probably because you only hang out on english-language forums full of people with similar views to your own.

Mitsubishi's revenue and expanse as an example is just crazy when comparing to Euro-American companies. Their revenue and major groups under the company are huge! Great example.

Amazon is ~24 years old and already larger than all of them except Samsung (which they'll catch soon enough).

For example, Amazon is drastically larger than 3M. Four times the market cap, four times the sales. Not to mention 3M's business has been contracting for years, meanwhile Amazon is full speed ahead. So that gap will grow dramatically in just a few years. Amazon will hit $200 billion in sales in a few years, while 3M will have seen zero growth (Amazon will be 7x larger then).

Your comparison doesn't make much sense today. It'll make zero sense tomorrow. Samsung is the sole company in that group that will be comparable in just three or four more years.

You didn't mention other Korean companies or Japanese keiretsus. And also Mitsubishi wasn't named and is huge. Their revenue will likely dwarf Amazon for decades to come.

Your example is just 3M and is easy picking compared to any other example you could've chosen.

>Mitsubishi wasn't named and is huge. Their revenue will likely dwarf Amazon for decades to come.

Was curious, so I looked it up. Mitsubishi's revenue (as of 2011, which is where Wikipedia cuts off) was ~ $174B. Amazon's 2016 revenue was about $136B. I'm guessing Amazon has a higher revenue growth rate than Mitsubishi.

Samsung's total 2014 revenue was $305B. LG's 2012 revenue was $143B. SK's 2011 revenue was $99B. SMFG's 2011 revenue was ~28B. Toyota is the largest company in Japan at about $237B in revenue (not a keiretsu, but included for scale).

TL;DR; it's not easy to find a company (or related group) with revenue that dwarfs Amazon's. Amazon is really big.

You've only nitpicked 3M out of the group. Go look up some figures for the chaebol and the keiretsu ;)

This was not mentioned in the article, but I'd say this puts Amazon at the forefront of the issue of the disappearing "good job" in America ... as you mention, Amazon prefers contractors over employees.

Maybe for "unskilled labor" but I don't believe that to be true for engineering talent?

You forgot their own semi trucks and the Amazon Original Shows!

Also under logistics, "seller-fulfilled prime", adding good quality shippers to their delivery network.

I thought "seller-fulfilled prime" was just the seller shipping however they want as long as it was comparable to prime in shipping time. But only select sellers will be offered this.

Compare that to Berkshire Hathaway rather than to GOOG/FB and it's not quite as impressive.

But their core business ( selling products online) is selling too much counterfeit products ( as mentioned here).

But if the sales on Amazon would collapse, in an instant it would all be gone... ( except AWS)

PS. Don't know why i'm getting downvoted..

I remember reading one of the quarterly earnings reports last year. It said: Amazon as a whole (including AWS) made $500m that quarter. It also said that AWS made $600m that quarter.

What this means is that everything Amazon does that is not AWS lost $100m in a quarter. If you reduce the size of that, Amazon will make more money.