Why sell on Amazon instead of your own site? Can’t competitors to FBA spring up that have great logistics? Are there any? Can anyone link me to them?
You don't need to boil the ocean in order to serve a single community. For example, Facebook started in Harvard and its value to everyone in Harvard was based on how many people in Harvard used it, not how many people in the world used it.
Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers form a community, then a free market of fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that specific product, and then partner with the delivery companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the package. You might say that the delivery infrastructure is a cartel, but they're open to everyone and Amazon has been relying on them until finally spinning out their own. Same goes for CPU chips that Apple relies on etc.
Look at IPFS for example, competing with AWS for storage. It is growing every year and now powers 1% of all storage worldwide! And there is a free market.
Whereas these platforms are all centrally controlled by some billionaire (Zuck, Musk, Bezos) and his crew. You don't need to have their scale because you don't need to serve ALL COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD on day one. If you have an open source software like Wordpress or Magento, you can serve your customers with web hosting instead of Shopify or Amazon. Now the only question is, who would do fulfilment.
When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea.
Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.
MySpace
Friendster
Whimit - Russians online (LOL)
The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even able to launch, is because the open permissionless web disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to launch on top of them. They’d cannibalize them just like Amazon cannibalizes sellers.
Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should know that.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
One thing that gets overlooked in this is returns.
One of the big draws of Amazon is easy returns.
Whenever you have decentralized fulfillment centers, returns become a huge pain, because the fulfillment center that is happy to take your money and ship you the product, doesn't want the liability of dealing with returns.
This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more customers to them which they intelligently plowed back into the business in building out their own network, no small feat of course.
A newer competitor would no longer have access to that simple sales tax advantage, and so would have to find something else to compel customers with. Barring that, Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy are tough to compete with because they already offer rock bottom pricing and they don’t have to invest in a ton of new infrastructure for logistics.
Actually, the first thing to break their stranglehold is to have open source software that replicates their back-end and not just their front end. Such software could federate across many instances, therefore being decentralized. I remember Magento being such a software, I'm just wondering how it's been growing over the last decade.
The other part is fulfillment and advertising, each of which are also served by giant centralized corporations. The giant corporations pit advertisers against each other (e.g. YouTube encouraging people to buy advertisements on each other's videos).
Open sourcing the code is step 1 because it allows people to set up their own shops on their own sites, and not be subject to anyone else's rules, leading to a free market instead of feudalism.
Then what you want is a decentralized ecosystem of service providers that create infrastructure that is accessible over a standard protocol. Like IPFS has with storage infrastructure.
Otherwise, at best, you are just reduced to begging Daddy Government to force these corporations to break up. How well did that work for Ma Bell? The pieces were still a cartel, still charged $3 a minute. What the government couldn't do in a decade, open source technology and open protocols did in a few short years ... VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we have videoconferencing all over the world. Because once we decoupled the software (AOL, MSN, etc.) from the infrastructure via open protocols, the infra providers became a dumb pipes competing in a free market.
You can't open-source marketing and the insane delivery network Amazon has. Those, among other things, are the reason they are successful. They could release all of their software completely open source and literally nothing would change.
What you want here is an open source replacement for Amazon's product search that will find products from multiple independent sellers. The hard part is probably how to curate it; you want to allow legitimate small sellers without allowing the thing to be filled with scams. But Amazon hasn't done a very good job here either, so maybe it's not a high bar.
And then a payments system which is something in the nature of GNU Taler.
Amazon's logistics is an advantage, but is it an advantage that can overcome the need to pay them a vig instead of having the product shipped directly from the manufacturer? Lots of people willing to wait a week for shipping if the price is 10% lower.
Shopify as the front end
CargoWise for transportation, warehousing and everything logistics
Which leaves some of the more sophistiticated stuff like demand ballancing across the network, but that is doable by either developing something in-house or throwing an ERP system into tue mix.
All available off the shelf as we speak. There are other reason why nobody manages to seriously challenge Amazon.
I find most of your content here to not have any good follow-through.
Amazon isn't just some software on a few servers. It's a whole vertical enterprise. Suggesting that some front-end and back-end servers can take the place of warehouses, delivery people, fleets of machines (served by AWS no less), payment companies, 3rd party billing is just laughable, and shows the naivete of a sw engineer.
However, that last paragraph is terrible and absolutely true...
> Otherwise, at best, you are just reduced to begging Daddy Government to force these corporations to break up. How well did that work for Ma Bell? The pieces were still a cartel, still charged $3 a minute. What the government couldn't do in a decade, open source technology and open protocols did in a few short years ... VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we have videoconferencing all over the world. Because once we decoupled the software (AOL, MSN, etc.) from the infrastructure via open protocols, the infra providers became a dumb pipes competing in a free market.
I remember Ma Bell. Charged stupid prices for long distance, but was a good service. And then, the splitup happened. Did we get better services? Nope. We just got dozens of smaller monopolies all engaging in the EXACT SAME SCAMS that Ma Bell was broken up for.
It was when we started pushing data around and got away from POTS lines did we finally break the stranglehold of the baby bells. Even DSL has been basically thrown away, given how little the RBOCs dont want to advance and grow. Monopolies are like that.
Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for many decades, the government was barely able to make the prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in a couple years.
I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source software and open protocols cause the centralized services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.
Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.
Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the first step is to have open source software and federation. I'm not saying it's the only thing that needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.
Youve got 7k karma so you should also be able to vouch. Just make sure "showdead" is on in your settings.
As to the subject matter:
> Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for many decades, the government was barely able to make the prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in a couple years.
Mostly, but probably not on the actual mechanisms. I do agree that government's breakup of Ma Bell really made everything worse. And how it was broken up went from 1 monopoly to 20+ monopolies. The end user really just saw stuff stay bad or worse. Now, myself being an anti-capitalist, would have looked at this situation, and go "Well, communication networks are an integral part of national security, and should be nationalized, since this company was abusing the people", and would have federalized it under a nonprofit charter.
As to claiming that VoIP helped supplant - nah. People got their taste with dialup of the internet, and at a whole 4.3KB/s , and wanted faster. A 3 minute (3MB) song was 11 minutes to download... and Napster. Dialup was stagnating, and the telcos were being slow about DSL. I saw DSL eventually, cable networks, and WISPs pop up like weeds everywhere, because more and more killer apps were showing up. And frankly, at the time, Piracy was the killer app. Bittorrent, Kazaa, Gnutella, Napster.
> I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source software and open protocols cause the centralized services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.
That's the problem with the unbundling. That's not a software or code issue. That's a money issue, primarily with folks who have piles of money can force things others dont want.
And with vertical industries, it's never been a user-level experience in unbundling. To really force the issue, it goes back to the government to force it. And the US doesnt have a good track history in doing that well. This problem is always been a coordination issue, where larger monoliths can do well from a dictatorial governance (companies).
> Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.
It's disingenuous to lump all those together.
The "Web" was a group of academics and governments, that finally agreed to let capitalist and commercial groups in on 1993. And those groups also included corporate private networks like the ones you listed.
Wikipedia was the first real test of anonymous and user-level editing across a website, under newly created Wiki software. Sure, the 2 encyclopedias were killed by Wikipedia, but Wikipedia only hastened their death. Bulk books like encyclopedias were already declining. However, we learned a great deal about the ills of letting users edit webpages like encyclopedias realtime. And we're still fighting with those problems. (for example, you'd never see the "lists of Jews", aside a few high profile people in a proper encyclopedia, but here it is.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Jews )
You mention "disrupt IIS"... and I'm here on my work laptop with 2 IIS consoles open. Free is going to win out cost-wise, for things like startups and hobbists. But there's lots of industries who've developed and maintain in IIS. And in my industry, I'm not permitted to use NGiNX.
> Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the first step is to have open source software and federation. I'm not saying it's the only thing that needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.
First, BlueSky is closed source proprietary spun off from Xwitter's former CEO.
I'm not seeing it. Well, a part I do. Having the software to start doing stuff your own direction is a good start. But much of this isn't a software problem. Its a logistics and integration problem, with a massive vertical integration across the whole thing.
Amazon's probably too big to break up. The individual pieces don't make that much sense individually. That's why I'm for taking control of said organization at the C level and BoD level, and start disassembling the illegal parts from the top down under full transparency and oversight. Maybe that'll be enough to scare other companies engaged in extreme monopolistic practices that thhink they are "too big to fail", will just be eminent domained.
Cool example you chose there. 99% of VoIP is actually closed source, proprietary solutions.
WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype, Telegram, Google Whatever, Slack, Teams, ...
It was like a group of Java developers decided to write PHP code and it was horrific. I would estimate 80% of the classes in that codebase didn't have any implementing code in them.
Literally the only thing I liked about Magento was it's ability to outline everything that was being rendered to make it easier for you to identify the changes to templates you needed to make.
in a lot of countries it would save a lot of money if the tax office had direct access to the product and purchase database. Thousands of people could move to more useful jobs.
You are sold "the dream" by showing top sellers / influencers / etc. and told you can be like them. Kevin O'Leary became a meme for promoting this bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA
In fact, even the top influencers can be deplatformed in an instant, and their speech is controlled. And same with Amazon. But the thing is that the people you never hear about, the "middle class", are far more controlled and the "long tail" produces all that free content that basically gets almost new views / buys but all that free sharecropper content is then used to train AI models or provide proof of large available inventory / product / content BY THE PLATFORM that pits them all against each other in a zero-sum game.
https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/117oh1m/the_upper_c...
The women is Amanda Lang,[1] and the two were a 'duo' for many years with a business/finance reporting show. I'm not sure how she managed to put up with him for so long. :)
That actually adds to the problem: If you put effort and money into brand recognition you need to provide best prices on amazon, but Amazon is easier to game if your brand is xyxxy12345.