Amazon, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 579Toni Cowan-Brown 94Leonard Brody 2Jeremy White 2Benedict Catton 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Amazon comes up
Token pricing
- ▶ 6:03 Benedict Evans For example, there's only three hyperscalers, but, and yet like most of the applications are built by other people and most of the value is captured by people who run on AWS.
- ▶ 8:48 Benedict Evans Everyone pays their money, but all the stuff you do with it is done by other people, and all the actual money is made by Meta, and Google, and Amazon, and, um, Tinder, and Uber, and everybody else.
The spring updates on AI
- ▶ 8:59 Benedict Evans We kind of think of Google and Amazon as being roughly the same company that they were 10 or 20 years, certainly 10 years ago, maybe 20 years ago.
- ▶ 18:08 Benedict Evans So, um, the sort of thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about from time to time, like comes and goes over the last decade or two is to think about recommendation systems that, you know, Amazon and Google and Meta don't really know what… 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:27 Benedict Evans Amazon was a bookstore.
- ▶ 32:11 Benedict Evans And if the answer is yes, then for a lot of categories, Amazon won. 3 times in the scene
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 7:23 Benedict Evans And you know, here we are, Amazon is still, you know, poking away at it after 25, 30 years, but, you know, grocery is different. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:12 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, they can get here as fast as an Amazon delivery, but you're paying for something more than that. 2 times in the scene
The end of the network effect
- ▶ 1:27 Benedict Evans Consumer computing has been based on network effects, that we had Windows and Intel, and then we had, with the web, we had Google, and then Facebook, and Amazon, and then the things that Facebook bought, and we had the iOS and Android,…
- ▶ 5:23 Benedict Evans And then the thousands of stuff that are built on top of it and run on top of it, the way you've got thousands of stuff built on top of and running on AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:07 Benedict Evans Is it on Google or Amazon? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:26 Benedict Evans The same thing for Amazon. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:30 Benedict Evans Like having the, how are you, because what's your plan to have clever people than Anthropic and Google and Meta and Apple and Amazon?
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 1:47 Benedict Evans But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled their cap, will say they're more or less doubled their capex this year. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:20 Benedict Evans And that's a different way of saying this thing's making tools for you than saying you're going to tell Claude to write code for you and then get you an AWS account
- ▶ 16:20 Benedict Evans It does this container, but do an API call to an image recognition model on AWS.
- ▶ 27:25 Benedict Evans Are you paying them for some SQL and some C++ and an AWS account that's already set up for you?
- ▶ 30:54 Benedict Evans Did you just go to Amazon, you know what you wanted, you pressed buy, it arrived, or did you want something else?
How does OpenAI compete?
- ▶ 4:12 Benedict Evans So, AI overviews, reworking Siri to make it good, transforming how Instagram works, much better search results, much better recommendations, better experience in Amazon, and so on.
- ▶ 5:41 Benedict Evans Um, and, or you can say, well, we're going to be the best infralayer for that, which takes you back to, okay, why, how are you going to be the best infralayer than this, as opposed to AWS or GCP or indeed Microsoft, or perhaps Oracle, if… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:02 unnamed speaker If you think that the answer is features, then Google and Meta and Apple and Amazon are doing great.
- ▶ 18:37 Benedict Evans Amazon is a bookstore.
The AI presentation
- ▶ 22:45 Benedict Evans It might be one doing this on Google cloud and that on, on Amazon.
- ▶ 25:55 Benedict Evans Let's talk about how much money these companies are spending on infrastructure, and let's contrast the fact that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:43 Benedict Evans My final section is to talk about, well, there's two things to talk about, as I kind of zoom out, is firstly, remember all the stuff that was going on before TouchUPT is still there, like e-commerce is now 30% of US retail, Amazon is now…
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 37:27 Toni Cowan-Brown Insert, you know, Salesforce, AWS.
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 0:37 Benedict Evans And it seemed to me that one of the things I struggle with is that what I'm most interested in and best at kind of talking about, or I find most congenial to talk about, is to sort of think about different products and think, well, you can…
- ▶ 5:46 Benedict Evans But it won't be, well, the equivalent of saying, why is Amazon going to be eBay? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:00 Benedict Evans That's what AWS, AWS is business.
- ▶ 9:12 Benedict Evans Well, this is sort of my point about, you know, what is Meta trying to do at a corporate level versus what Amazon's trying to do at a corporate level versus what Apple and what, what, what, what, um, in a sense, you could kind of put a… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:00 Benedict Evans And that overlaps with, with, with Amazon, which is in the business of selling, AWS, which is in the business of selling generic 4 times in the scene
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 4:47 Benedict Evans There's a new model every month, hour and every week, and, well, it scores higher on this and lower on that, and, you know, the new Amazon model, it sort of seems to do better on images, but it's not quite so good on text, and there's a… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:01 Benedict Evans Amazon has a chatbot called, I don't know, Arthur or Edward or something. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:01 Benedict Evans On the other hand, the more interesting one was Amazon has finally got their own Nova model out, which seems to be more or less as good as all the others.
- ▶ 22:08 Benedict Evans And if you're the CIO, why would you invest in moving people off, off, um, fax workstations onto AWS?
- ▶ 39:00 Benedict Evans So like you talk to investors now, it's like, um, do we, we can't write a billion dollar check to Anthropix, so, but we also don't want to write the, invest in a thin GPT wrapper, but then no one says Snapchat is a, is a thin AWS wrapper. 3 times in the scene
From SAAS software to Formula 1
- ▶ 8:57 Toni Cowan-Brown And you look at the sponsors, it's the likes of Juniper, it's the likes of Salesforce, AWS, Oracle, like every other sponsor is a giant tech sponsor. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:40 Benedict Catton About TV, which is that, um, we've had this sort of probably 10 X increase in the amount of scripted TV being produced in the US in the last 10 years, um, driven by streaming and then by, firstly by Netflix and Amazon, and then by all the,… 2 times in the scene
Google's Antitrust case
- ▶ 13:00 Benedict Evans They're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say, hmm, this is a product search question, let's do an integration with Amazon.
- ▶ 15:06 Benedict Evans Amazon, maybe. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:43 Benedict Evans Well, not Meta, not Amazon.
- ▶ 26:41 Benedict Evans Which is kind of ironic, because the market definition, which is, we talked about before, Google tried to say, we don't have a monopoly because we compete with Amazon, and TikTok, and Facebook search, and with Booking.com for flight search. 4 times in the scene
The AI summer
- ▶ 20:58 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, it's fascinating though, because you keep, you brought up Oracle a few times, and I was working on some projects with AWS, who happened to be the title sponsor of the Canadian GP, and Oracle and AWS both are clearly working on a… 3 times in the scene
Looking for AI use-cases
- ▶ 14:11 Benedict Evans Now, see everything I've done is obviously what Amazon is doing. 2 times in the scene
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 31:59 Benedict Evans And then you have an intermediate aggregator, which in the past was Amazon. 5 times in the scene
Breaking and remaking media
- ▶ 2:26 Benedict Evans Um, you know, obviously lots has changed, and they've got Amazon as this one giant customer, but we did not move to a model in which everybody gets all the books they want, and all the books are digital, and the publishing model breaks up,…
- ▶ 13:40 Benedict Evans You can rent every movie ever made on iTunes or whatever platform and, you know, Prime has got a whole library and Netflix has got some and so on.
- ▶ 19:02 Benedict Evans Now they've got direct competition from Disney plus and prime and Netflix.
- ▶ 19:20 Benedict Evans More, uh, 16 to 34 watch more stuff from basically Netflix and certainly from Netflix and Amazon than everything from the legacy TV companies combined.
Apple's Vision Pro
- ▶ 14:03 Benedict Evans You know, neither is the weather, neither is Amazon, neither is Facebook.
What's your AI strategy?
- ▶ 11:02 Benedict Evans You can actually still buy them on Amazon.
- ▶ 23:25 Benedict Evans Is this Alexa that works?
- ▶ 30:40 Benedict Evans Amazon is overrun. 3 times in the scene
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 5:25 Benedict Evans AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.
- ▶ 28:09 Benedict Evans You know, today, like all startups run on, you know, GCP, Azure, or AWS, or a lot of them do, but like AWS doesn't decide what, you know, you, a legal software company can do. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:12 Benedict Evans Will, will Amazon and Apple go big on buying football rights?
Bundling/Unbundling AI
- ▶ 1:26 Benedict Evans And I, and I thought it was interesting to compare this with, with Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri and so on sort of now almost 10 years ago, which were kind of a full storm because you had machine learning then meant that they could… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:45 Benedict Evans So Alexa could only do cricket scores because someone at Amazon had sat down and written a thing to do cricket scores and that didn't scale.
- ▶ 28:16 Benedict Evans So there's a bunch of, um, so there's, so there's a, there's an inside technology conversation here, which is the word thin in GPT wrapper, which is what I, what I've just described that law for legal software company will be using for the… 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:53 Benedict Evans With pen computing, was to compare voice computing, and it's really interesting that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that all sort of, we were talking, noting that the ChatGPT basically did what Alexa did, but with using text…
The magic customer
- ▶ 26:34 Leonard Brody The thing with demography that drives me crazy is people are trying to say, well, the person clicking that button to buy on Amazon is different than the person that came the generation before.
- ▶ 33:59 Leonard Brody It's easy to go and be a Alibaba reseller on Amazon.
Unbundling ChatGPT
- ▶ 2:07 Benedict Evans It can do anything formal in a sense that Alexa couldn't,
- ▶ 6:07 Benedict Evans You can actually still buy them on, on, on Amazon.
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 26:40 Benedict Evans Well, clearly both Amazon and YouTube have unbundled Google in that sense that you go to Amazon for product and you go to YouTube for not just for quote unquote video, but for, for a lot of other stuff that might previously have been text. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:39 Benedict Evans So, you know, are Amazon ads advertising or marketing or rent or price discrimination?
Amazon's $40B advertising business
- ▶ 0:07 Toni Cowan-Brown We actually haven't talked about your presentation, so this feels good to chat or to pull out one topic, which seems to be a very topical topic to talk about right now, which is Amazon's billion dollar advertising industry, which is at… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:03 Benedict Evans So the context is, a couple of years ago, um, uh, Amazon has a breakout, a different breakout of its revenue in the back of the accounts, and there's a line in there called Other, and a couple of years ago the line called Other started… 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:33 Benedict Evans It's also bigger than Amazon Prime.
- ▶ 1:35 Benedict Evans Um, it's almost certainly more profitable than AWS. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:13 Benedict Evans However, the more interesting thing is to say that it's not really a standalone business, and the dumb thing is to say, yes, not a standalone business because you couldn't have it without the rest of Amazon. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:23 Benedict Evans The more important point, I think, is to say, um, okay, could you do a P&L for Prime? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:36 Benedict Evans Second answer would be, um, that, you know, a lot of people have kind of said, you go to Amazon now, and like all the first page results are all ads, and they may not necessarily be what you searched for.
- ▶ 9:10 Benedict Evans It's like, yes, um, this is a new manifestation of something that's very old, but the other part is it's not just Amazon that's doing this. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:12 Benedict Evans Well, so part of the sort of the narrative of the presentation that I published last month, a couple of weeks ago, was, um, I called it the new gatekeepers, and kind of part of my point was, they were old gatekeepers, and they were… 9 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:58 Toni Cowan-Brown And obviously this is people on TikTok with an Amazon storefront with all of the gadgets and gizmos, and those have a popularity sometimes of selling out completely. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:35 Benedict Evans I mean, there's another sort of angle here, which is, um, the unbonding of Google, because clearly, you know, what's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:09 Toni Cowan-Brown The Amazon's advertising business right now is at thirty eight billion.
ChatGPT versus Google
- ▶ 4:38 Benedict Evans And all of those have to be bought by hand, which was also the problem with chatbots five years ago, which was machine learning meant you could ask Alexa a question and it could understand the question, but it could only answer 10… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:49 Benedict Evans And he, and if for it to answer an 11th question, that someone at Amazon would have to build that. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:09 Toni Cowan-Brown Like, that's, again, like, I will search on Google, and I will then open up YouTube, and I will search for answers on YouTube, and I guess that's the vertical searching in, in me, that I just, like, I know there's a couple of different, or…
- ▶ 28:51 Benedict Evans Half of them, half of Amazon's CapEx goes to AWS.
- ▶ 28:51 Benedict Evans Half of them, half of Amazon's CapEx goes to AWS.
Generative search
- ▶ 9:43 Benedict Evans And it probably gets done as part of GCP and Azure and AWS. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:33 Benedict Evans I mean, maybe Microsoft, but like, Amazon isn't going to build a legal discovery management platform.
Generative AI
- ▶ 18:53 Benedict Evans I mean, there was a kind of classic story of Amazon, um, building and testing a system for hiring for screening CVs, resumes, I should say to Americans. 2 times in the scene
Why are chips interesting again?
- ▶ 1:27 Benedict Evans Um, everyone from Amazon to YouTube are designing their own chips instead of just buying them off the shelf.
- ▶ 9:21 Benedict Evans And the same if you're AWS or the same if you're YouTube, like you're big enough that even if making your own chip might be more expensive on one level, it makes more economic sense on another.
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
- ▶ 1:29 Benedict Evans And she, she uses her case study looking at Amazon, which is obviously has, you know, very large market share in e-commerce. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:02 Benedict Evans And the fundamental competitive, you know, like if Amazon would have tried to buy Shopify, for example, well, that's, that's a subscription software program service that isn't a consumer facing brand. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:51 Benedict Evans And so Azure is now, um, sort of with AWS, but they're kind of the dominant cloud cloud provider, but sort of generally further up the stack than AWS. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:09 Toni Cowan-Brown Did anyone have any issues with Amazon buying Twitch as a streaming platform? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:30 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, part of the, um, which is not part of the narrative, sort of part of the conversation, which is not, doesn't apply to Within or Activision, is, um, so last year the FTC, um, did a study where they got Google, Apple, Facebook,…
- ▶ 36:01 Benedict Evans The story here was that when, that Amazon had the dominant eBooks platform in the form of the Kindle, and they were selling at cost or indeed below cost. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:01 Benedict Evans The story here was that when, that Amazon had the dominant eBooks platform in the form of the Kindle, and they were selling at cost or indeed below cost.
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 1:43 Benedict Evans And they have built a business entirely on Amazon, almost entirely on Amazon, on Amazon Marketplace. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:43 Benedict Evans And they have built a business entirely on Amazon, almost entirely on Amazon, on Amazon Marketplace. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:37 Toni Cowan-Brown It, it used to be that you would absolutely need an Amazon or a Best Buy to go and to tell you what are the four or five best cameras that you should be looking at. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:23 Benedict Evans I mean, I've just bought, I've just bought a Christmas present for someone, and I bought it from a kitchen homeware shop that I know in London, because that's the plate, rather than going to Amazon and search for kitchen knives,
- ▶ 21:57 Benedict Evans Um, and so, you know, I and a bunch of other people sort of, 18 months ago, noticed this line in Amazon's accounts called Other that was shooting up, and um, because they gave this other revenue, and that they said was predominantly ads,… 10 times in the scene
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