For example consider Sony: Sony Computer Entertainment (gaming), Sony Mobile (phones), Sony Pictures (movies), Sony Music (music), Sony Life (insurance), Sony Bank (banking), Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Visual (imaging), Sony Medical (medtech)
My mom would affiliate Samsung with TVs. I'd probably put them with computer monitors and phones.
They also build skyscrapers and power plants (Samsung C&T Corporation), and ships (Samsung Heavy Industries). They also sell Life Insurance in South Korea.
(Really, that's two separate companies which license the brand from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Licensing_Corporat...)
I'll say however, that Samsung appears vastly undervalued. GE is trading at about 20 times earnings, Samsung is trading at 20 times just its last quarter alone (and around 5 or 6 times trailing four quarters).
Also worth noting, that despite being more profitable than Apple, Samsung trades at a 60% discount to AAPL.
Fun fact: Twitter is worth more than Sony. Billions more.
And Sony as a brand is split in different groups depending on the activities (e.g. finance, music production, content licensing, network provider and who know what else). Twitter's not in the same league.
Vis-à-vis Amazon, I'm not sure it's a problem yet, I think of them as a retailer, AWS and Kindle, etc as separate brands. I don't see the problem at this juncture.
The first thing in my mind is almost always one of their technical services, most specifically AWS
- They have exceptionally high customer satisfaction. Routinely ranked among the best.
- They have great inventory management and warehousing, delivering stellar shipping times (assisting their customer happiness numbers).
- AWS is arguably the best overall cloud service. Google and Microsoft - tech giants bar none - are still struggling to catch up to where AWS was years ago.
- Their prices are extremely competitive across the board, with even the king of cheap Walmart.
- The Kindle reader service is the best, there really isn't even a close second these days. The Nook is being buried.
- I pay more fees to Amazon to sell a product and take on more losses than other online marketplaces.
- I had to quit Amazon S3 due to glitches hosting and streaming simple mp3 files. After days of troubleshooting, I just moved my files over to another service and all my problems went away.
- Crappy video streaming. I stopped buying episodes and movies from them and just bought them on YouTube where the streaming and quality was much better, at the same price.
- "AWS is arguably the best overall cloud service." Absolute Nonsense. But it's good to see their marketing efforts paid off. They offered good deals to startups which made them popular with Silicon Valley / Tech Crunch types. Every few months here on HN we get an "AWS vs Rackspace vs Other competitor" article. Amazon is NOT the best when it comes to price nor value.
- The user experience is terrible, the control panel even worse. The Seller Control Panel behaves like it's from 1997.
Not to mention:
- The slave-like conditions in their warehouses that keeps those prices low which so many people have blogged about.
Bezos is smart. But calling Amazon a master of something just because of their throughput quanity seems uncalled for. They're a giant company that was the first to make such a giant land grab in marketplaces & they use their weight to get to high places, not their "mastery".
I normally just take my losses and refund asap in these situations, but I was given no chance because the customer filed it right away.
Amazon banned my account within an hour of the claim. I thought it was a mistake and tried to contact seller support. Little did I know that there is no support. There was a maze of automated responses..and then a permanent ban. I can't signup to any Amazon services to this day.
I'm just shocked that Amazon can get away with taking as much as 16% from a seller..and then offer almost no support.
Even worse is the fact that you can build a business for years on Amazon..with little to show for it. You don't get any contact info. When your account is banned, your business is done. It's too much power to put in the hands of a company that has no respect for its sellers.
My assumption on Bezos is that half is he's an obsessive genius, and half is he hires very well. You need the right people to keep the parts moving without detailed guidance.
You can tell that Google is aware of this challenge by the simplicity of their Search screen. They keep a lot of their offerings hived away from the top screen.
The danger of a conglomerate is that a culture or decision-making paradigm suitable for the dominant business(es) might not be good for others. E.g., smaller businesses might get ignored because they don't matter enough. Or they might not be allowed to move quickly and take risks. E.g., Xerox found that selling LISP machines and copier paper mixed badly, as reorders of the latter were held hostage to the immaturity of the former.
On a serious side, it stops when Bezos can't make it work and there aren't many things that fit in that category. I'll see you at Amazon U.
Amazon is a retailer and cloud computing provider and a video streaming service and a TV producer and a device manufacturer and a grocery store and a bank for small business loans and a hundred other things... At what point does the umbrella brand start to confuse people?
Bezos must have a brain the size of Texas to keep all these moving parts in mind.