Re:Tim Bray told a union meeting Amazon should be broken up
by JoeAltmaier on Friday June 12, 2020 @11:25AM
(#23500172)
Nonsense. That's the 'great man' theory. Its clear from history that when the time has come, the business appears. There were many online retail operations when Bezos came on the scene. If Amazon hadn't happened, then another company would have.
Heck, Amazon isn't even Amazon any more. Its a two- or three-removed reinvention of what Amazon started out to be.
Re:Tim Bray told a union meeting Amazon should be broken up
by logicchains on Friday June 12, 2020 @11:56AM
(#23500488)
>If Amazon hadn't happened, then another company would have.
It would have happened later, so everybody's standard of living would have been a little lower. The more you discourage people from starting businesses, the fewer people try to start businesses, so successful new business are created more slowly, and the economy grows slower. It's also more likely the company will appear first in another country more friendly to business, and then the original country will lose out on the revenue, jobs and soft power it might have gained from that country operating there.
Re:Tim Bray told a union meeting Amazon should be broken up
by JoeAltmaier on Friday June 12, 2020 @12:14PM
(#23500672)
Depends on how much you respect what Amazon does. Perhaps we'd all be better off.
If they had the opportunity to build things in better conditions, why aren't they already doing that?
Look at it this way, if nobody did what Bezos did, nobody quit their job to try starting a business (bearing in mind something like over 90% of businesses fail, so it's a significant risk), then there wouldn't be any jobs. We'd all still be subsistence farmers. And this is essentially the condition that the world was in before we had a government/legal system that allowed people to create and grow businesses free from molestation.
If not for Bezos, Amazon wouldn't exist, and all the beneft people gained from the superior convenience, prices and delivery speed it offered compared to competitors would have been lost.