On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined.
(via Businessweek)
"Our heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer.
But I don’t think so.
To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in.
More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align."
- Jeff Bezos | Amazon’s Letter To Shareholders Should Inspire Every Company In America
"Of the most talked-about tech companies, Facebook by far received the least love. While Amazon, Apple and Google all ranked in the top five with total scores above eighty out of 100, and Microsoft ranked 15th with a “good” score above 75, Facebook came in 42nd – sandwiched between Best Buy and T-Mobile – with a score of just over 65, or what Fronk described as the borderline between “average” and “poor.”
“Facebook suffers badly from lack of trust,” Fronk said.
Amazon arguably collects as much personal data about its customers as Facebook does about its users, or at least if not as much, then possibly more intimate: purchase history, product search history, home address, credit card numbers."
- Hating Amazon Is Not a Thing. Facebook on the Other Hand …
"‘Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see brick and mortar,’ says Robert Fronk, executive vice-president of reputation management at Harris. ‘For them to first of all have the highest reputation, but more importantly to be the company with far and away the highest emotional appeal, is amazing.’ Harris defines emotional appeal as trust, admiration and respect, not whether you get weepy when your package arrives."
- Hating Amazon Is Not a Thing. Facebook on the Other Hand …
Meanwhile, Amazon’s online-only approach is proving to also be a hit with consumers when it comes to trust: it got “nearly 100%” positive ratings on all questions related to trust. “More than 50 percent of respondents also recall discussing Amazon with friends and family in the past year, and nearly 100 percent of these conversations were positive,” Harris writes.
"This is the first time in the history of the world where the map maker is worth more than the territory that it’s mapping."
- Jeff Bezos on Google, as recalled by a former Amazon executive to Reuters. (via parislemon)
An Amazon engineer had a little idea that turned into a billion-dollar business
Once upon a time, Amazon was a dot-com-era technology company best known for selling books. Then, in 2003 and 2004, Amazon wanted to streamline its internal process between the programmers and the hardware engineers. It was a move that many other companies were taking, but an Amazon engineer had a brilliant idea: Why not use the same project to design an application that could rent chunks of Amazon’s computing facilities to customers?
On August 24, 2006, the public beta of Amazon’s “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS). And so, the ability to rent computing capacity managed by someone else was born.
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Here’s another perk we just heard about: If you don’t need your order in two days, Amazon will sometimes pay you to accept a slower ship time.
So Amazon has now upped the retail ante from free shipping to we-pay-you shipping.
""It’s clear the publishers are trying to band together to give themselves even deeper pockets. Somewhere Jeff Bezos is doing his signature cackle that the publishers have been baited into trying to play his game. It’s like bringing a knife to a gun fight, when the other guy has a semi-automatic gun that shoots crazy cash and distribution. Bezos knows what anyone with a basic grasp of math knows: They could all merge together and still not out-spend him. He can lose money on every big book deal; the publishers cannot. You think he’s not crazy enough to keep losing money until he dominates an industry? Try him.
…Publishers can only be gutted by Amazon, because they put themselves in a position where cash advances and placement in bookstores were the only two things they brought to the table. And guess what? As Tim Ferriss’s moonwalking-blog attests, if you have Amazon, you don’t need either of those."
- All six mega-publishers can merge, and they still won’t win Amazon’s game
"Bezos is the ultimate disrupter: He has upended the book industry and displaced electronics merchants. Now Amazon is pushing into everything from couture retailing and feature-film production to iPad-worthy tablet manufacturing. Amazon even sells ultracheap database software for businesses. (Oracle (ORCL), take note.) He’s willing to take risks and lose money, yet investors have embraced him, pushing Amazon’s stock up 30% so far this year. And even as Amazon expands and experiments, Bezos remains zealous about delivering a good customer experience. For all these reasons and more, Fortune has named Bezos its 2012 Businessperson of the Year."
"75% of the items offered by Best Buy are cheaper on Amazon, on average by 17%."
- Best Buy’s Amazon price match is a $400M all-in bet it can’t win
Ebooks Made of YouTube Comments Invade Amazon Kindle Store
From the press release:
The Internet slang of YouTube comments is treated as fresh dialogue, and sold through Amazon.com in the form of massive, self-generated e-books. In an auto-cannibalistic model, user generated content is sold back to the users themselves, parasitically exploiting both corporations: YouTube and Amazon.
