Priceline now worth $100B

Re:Priceline now worth $100B by rayiner on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:03PM (#14858542)

The Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive. It's much easier to leverage network effects to tie consumers to producers. Why make or build anything when you can control the market by controlling the app at the end of the distribution chain?

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by stcredzero on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:33PM (#14858860)

The Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive.

Therefore, we should be looking for industries where connecting buyers to sellers is the big question! (Or owners to leasers, or lenders to borrowers.)

We should also be looking at why apps that are supposed to do this connecting fail.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by scottLobster on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:10PM (#14859198)

We should also be wondering about the lack of incentive to be a producer/owner when being a middleman is so comparatively lucrative. If capital and talent starts shifting to middlemen in pursuit of higher returns it could cause a lot of markets to stagnate with only the big players having the resources to make a profit off of producing.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by raugustinus on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:46PM (#14859547)

Thank you for this interesting thought. My first thought was this. Why wouldn't I make furniture and sell directly to customers. Which is something I've been thinking of doing. One problem is that the computer desks I'm thinking about might not be what people want. Why? They will be expensive and it seems like the whole world thinks the IKEA desks are what they really want/need. Check some YouTube tech reviewers, the build game PC's worth thousands but they're nearly always put on IKEA desks because they're cheap (ish).

I guess marketing is at play there.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by wlesieutre on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:19PM (#14859876)

Or because a $1000 gaming PC is objectively better at running games than a $500 gaming PC on every single metric (except maybe power consumption), but a cheap Ikea desk can hold my keyboard and monitor at 28.5" off the floor just as well as an expensive one can.

It's nice to have solidly built furniture, but not everybody cares enough to pay a premium for that. If the demographic you're looking at is "YouTube tech reviewers" then it's especially unsurprising. Those are people who place value on having fancy tech. I wouldn't blame marketing, just a question of limited budgets and personal priorities.

I've seen some pretty cool DIY computer desks, like one where the computer components are spread out and visible over a glass top, or it's hidden away in a cabinet on the side, but it's a comparatively small number of people who care.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by scottLobster on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @07:04PM (#14861195)

The issue there is part marketing part economies of scale. A small shop won't be able to compete with IKEA on price. You basically have to do what Tesla, Craft Breweries and other relatively small fish do and start out on the high end where cost is less of a concern and scale doesn't matter as much. Unfortunately that's a tall order in and of itself as it takes a lot of time, talent and money to produce a truly top-shelf product and, as we're discussing here, you're probably better off financially being some sort of broker for current goods than producing new/innovative goods yourself.

That said, if you're capable of producing high quality furniture with expensive materials, with the right marketing I imagine you could make quite a bit. People pay boatloads of money for reclaimed/exotic wood desks with attractive aesthetics.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by flinty on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @05:00PM (#14860313)

yep, marketing turns a commodity into something cherished and desired. Literally everything is a commodity unless marketing has put gloss on it

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by WestCoastJustin on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:19PM (#14858726)

It also allows for mom-and-pop shops selling direct to end users around the world. I used to run a video education business and that was pretty game changing when you have access to the world market via the internet. The key for priceline seems to the aggregation function that makes it a worthwhile middleman.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by sjg007 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:29PM (#14858823)

I think aggregation is a winner take all business basically. It's easier to do one priceline query vs go to each airlines website.

The only thing easier might be an Alexa app or chat bot or something. Even then people that shop on priceline are probably more cost sensitive etc..

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by anigbrowl on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:04PM (#14859750)

So it's the means of distribution that need seizing.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by mtgx on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:37PM (#14858891)

Wasn't the Internet supposed to eliminate the middleman?

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by edwinnathaniel on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:45PM (#14858964)

It did when it comes to distribution channel.

A hotel can have a website where people can directly book a room.

But people want to compare prices, shops around, hence a new form of ... middleman :D

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by jsight on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @02:50PM (#14859015)

Yeah, and they these middlemen also give hotels a way to sell lesser service and blame the middleman. Going through the third-party often loses membership perks and amenities and generally also makes cancellation much harder, in exchange for a lesser rate.

If the hotel offered the lesser rate themselves, they would effectively be pricing their "free" amenities, and they don't want to do that.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by nemo44x on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:25PM (#14859345)

It's not that they "don't" want to do that - in fact they'd very much like to. It's that they can't do it. Their agreements with listing services prohibit this. And if they don't get listed then they simply won't get the same rate of bookings.

Generally they are paying around 20% of the booking fee to the listing service. So in theory the hotel would be able to charge 15% less on their own site and make a larger profit. But if they did they would no longer get listed on the popular sites where people go to easily price compare and then book.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by coredog64 on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @04:27PM (#14859972)

The loophole in those agreements is that the best price that listing services show is the best "public" price. Larger hotel chains are working around that by offering lower prices to their loyalty club members.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by aglavine on Saturday July 29, 2017 @09:50PM (#14883978)

On the contrary, cancellation and purchase is easier. And also middle men add visibility to a lot of small hotels.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by JetSpiegel on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:27PM (#14859359)

Hell, there are aggregator aggregators already. Sites that compare prices between aggregators.

It's turtles all the way down.

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Re:Priceline now worth $100B by flamedoge on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:23PM (#14859312)

Not eliminate, replace

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