Amazon, every mention
249 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Amazon
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
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 22:49 Benedict Evans And, and then, um, basically, um, the same revenue as Amazon Prime.
- ▶ 22:55 Benedict Evans It's also probably this, it's also probably the same operating income, although they don't break it out as AWS. 3 times in the scene
The FTX face-palm
- ▶ 19:51 Benedict Evans Never mind having email or having Amazon.
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 23:25 Benedict Evans But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to worry about how Instagram works. 3 times in the scene
Wondering about generative AI
- ▶ 17:03 Benedict Evans I mean, the classic one would be like, I think Amazon built a machine learning engine for looking at hiring. 3 times in the scene
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
- ▶ 16:14 Benedict Evans Neither is Facebook, neither is Apple, neither is Amazon. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:52 Benedict Evans Do they just care about Facebook and Amazon?
TV after software
- ▶ 21:48 Benedict Evans And again, the book publishers had to understand what this was, but now all the conversations in book publishing were about books and, you know, yes, Amazon has, you know, there's a giant in the room with whatever it is, 3040, 50% market…
A new wave of company creation
- ▶ 27:54 Benedict Evans Like, it's, it's all about a very, very small narrow margin, and that's also the story for Amazon, and it's a story for grocery delivery, it's a story for all these one-hour grocery things, it's a story for restaurant delivery, it's a…
Lighting and tech diffusion
- ▶ 16:07 Benedict Evans And I think August got bought by Amazon. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:09 Benedict Evans That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple.
The FTC's antitrust thesis
- ▶ 2:09 Benedict Evans And Amazon was the perfect case study of this because Amazon is cheap yet a monopolist, or what is it a monopolist? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:55 Benedict Evans And late last year, the FTC published a study that they got by collecting data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, which I wrote about at the time. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:54 Benedict Evans So are you going to say that, I don't know that, that Amazon cannot buy Whole Foods and Whole Foods has a tiny market share in grocery. 9 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:07 Benedict Evans Um, AWS can't buy Cloudflare, say, like you could have that whole conversation.
- ▶ 25:32 Benedict Evans You're going to ban Google, Facebook, Amazon, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, all these companies.
When the point of leverage changes
- ▶ 0:04 Toni Cowan-Brown And today we thought we'd talk about Amazon and how it's interested in healthcare and it wants to be a player in that industry or potentially, but what all the other companies that come up when we talk about a company like Amazon going… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:39 Benedict Evans And so, um, Amazon has probably a ten billion dollar budget for buying TV shows, which exists as a way to get people to keep their prime subscription and to retain the prime. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:43 Benedict Evans Amazon can spend ten billion dollars a year buying content. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:53 Benedict Evans There's not really any Amazon co-branding at Whole Foods, although there is prime branding.
- ▶ 11:33 Toni Cowan-Brown And these are two things that Amazon and Apple do incredibly well, which is a customer acquisition and customer care. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:23 Benedict Evans Um, and I think, so, so, so the healthcare, say, well, there's a bank thing, and you can think about definitions, obviously, for, for healthcare, so we should just say, we didn't say at the beginning, so Amazon has bought this thing called… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:05 Benedict Evans I mean, yes, you've got people saying, oh, well, it's all about the user data and they'll bundle it with prime.
- ▶ 19:01 Benedict Evans Would Amazon, I could, I could almost make it, it's easier for me to see Amazon doing that and say, we are going to break through the cost of the medicine part than the insurance part. 9 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:29 Benedict Evans I mean, again, talking about this on Twitter, I had a bunch of people saying, well, look at AWS, that's completely different.
- ▶ 23:54 Benedict Evans That's not Amazon, except it's there to support Prime.
- ▶ 27:03 Benedict Evans I don't get you what a market definition would be of Amazon. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:07 Benedict Evans You know, there's, there's clearly there's Amazon retail and there's AWS, which is clearly a separate market definition.
- ▶ 35:57 Toni Cowan-Brown I like this way of looking at like how, whether it's alphabet getting into cars, whether it's Amazon getting into healthcare or Apple getting into banks of just like this point of leverage is changing. 4 times in the scene
Remember AI?
- ▶ 9:08 Benedict Evans That level of primitive was actually better done inside AWS or inside Azure rather than as a standalone startup.
What's next for advertising?
- ▶ 16:09 Benedict Evans But secondly, this phrase merchant media, which means Amazon shows you ads in the search results, or Walgreens does, or Walmart, um, or Tesco, um, in which obviously they have a bunch of data about what you've been buying, and so they can… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:42 Benedict Evans Where is the money coming from to buy that thirty one billion dollars of advertising on Amazon?
Three ways to say no
- ▶ 11:12 Benedict Evans So it tries to regulate Amazon and Airbnb and Uber and the App Store and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits
- ▶ 2:24 Benedict Evans So how do we think about the intersection of Square, which is now called Block, and Stripe, and, um, Web Three, and Google, and Amazon, and online advertising, and all the different companies that are kind of climbing that mountain from…
- ▶ 7:48 Benedict Evans Well, this was like sort of step one is, is like, um, if you don't, I mean, obviously the Amazon is step one is if you don't have physical retail space, you can stock everything.
- ▶ 12:46 Benedict Evans No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing, and… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:45 Benedict Evans Um, what machine learning sort of gives you is, well, if you have something, and this is what, what DeepMind does, is if there's something that you have a score, then the system can get better, and so at a certain point the system can… 3 times in the scene
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 2:45 Benedict Evans Um, in the last quarter, obviously Amazon's is thirty one billion dollars, but they're quite a lot further down that down that road. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:48 Benedict Evans And so there's this sort of classic story sort of a year ago that ITV wanted to be on, sent to Amazon and 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:42 Benedict Evans You can't just buy, yeah, you have to build those relationships and people have to, particularly now you've got Disney and Amazon and everybody else in there as well, and Apple may be bidding against you.
- ▶ 37:21 Benedict Evans And you can say, say everything you like about Amazon and e-commerce and how you would like, you know, yes, but this is just a terrible retailer. 4 times in the scene
Netflix isn't a tech company
- ▶ 9:36 Benedict Evans Do you remember, there's a website, I can't remember what it was called, but it was a website that was just finding nice things, suggesting nice things to buy on Amazon. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:26 Benedict Evans Um, of course, if you're, of course, if you're, if you're, if you're Apple, the purpose of this is to sell more iPhones, ultimately, and if you're, you're Amazon, which having said tech isn't in this, of course, Amazon is. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:42 Benedict Evans Um, Amazon, of course, is in that there's, there's Amazon Prime, which of course, and which of course they use to get you to keep your Amazon Prime subscription. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:47 Benedict Evans Fifteen billion dollars a year, which is what Netflix, for the sake of argument, what Netflix spends, and close to what Amazon spends. 2 times in the scene
Are you a seal?
- ▶ 0:35 Benedict Evans It's a construct from people who aren't in tech that there's Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft,
- ▶ 2:52 Benedict Evans Should be fairly obvious that, you know, the strategic things that Apple worry about have got almost nothing in common with the strategic things that Amazon worries about 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:03 Benedict Evans So, you know, Amazon is building, A, an enterprise cloud service system in AWS, and B, a retail e-commerce logistics platform, um, in the Amazon thing that we, that we will see, and so there's things they build around that, so they build… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:03 Benedict Evans So, you know, Amazon is building, A, an enterprise cloud service system in AWS, and B, a retail e-commerce logistics platform, um, in the Amazon thing that we, that we will see, and so there's things they build around that, so they build…
- ▶ 9:31 Benedict Evans They want to turn it, particularly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, they want to turn it into automated self-service software.
- ▶ 10:36 Benedict Evans Well, the example would be Google doing grocery delivery, because basically Google, sorry, not Amazon doing grocery delivery, and so basically Amazon's logistics platform is this vast packetized network. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:15 Benedict Evans By extension, the metaphor, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, they, they won.
- ▶ 29:02 Benedict Evans They'll just sell the machine learning and they'll try and compete with, um, with AWS and Azure for that.
The Evolution of networks
- ▶ 19:08 Benedict Evans It's like, it's like thinking, oh, I could make a web browser that would let me show Amazon in a completely different way. 5 times in the scene
Ukraine
- ▶ 25:06 Benedict Evans And so instead of having a Chinese Google and a Chinese Amazon and a Chinese Facebook, you've got sort of half a dozen conglomerates, you know, Tencent and Alibaba are much bigger than all the others, but then you've got a whole bunch of… 2 times in the scene
The retail reset
- ▶ 5:33 Benedict Evans Um, and one extreme of that, of course, is obviously Amazon, which is basically the new Walmart, but, but there's also a whole bunch of other stuff around 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:50 Benedict Evans You buy it online, either from Apple or from Amazon or from AT&T or whoever.
- ▶ 20:39 Benedict Evans Um, and you know, this is, you know, you can look at this and say, this is Amazon, but you know, what's, you know, what, what happens over and over again is people invent these new experiences. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:41 Benedict Evans A whole bunch of these are going to get aggregated up into Amazons and so on.
Asking the dumb questions
- ▶ 13:28 Benedict Evans Amazon announced 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:16 Benedict Evans It's Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and they are the GM and Ford of our day, and 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:50 Benedict Evans Like, what's Amazon's market share? 2 times in the scene
What we know about web 3 so far
- ▶ 1:33 Benedict Evans You get companies like Yahoo, and eBay, and Amazon, and people making websites and putting content on them.
How to think about tech
- ▶ 1:20 Benedict Evans Hey, you know, Amazon's going to buy this. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:49 Benedict Evans Um, you know, what does it mean that Amazon has ads now?
- ▶ 12:23 Benedict Evans It's why Amazon, Amazon spends over ten billion dollars a year buying original TV content.
- ▶ 18:20 Benedict Evans Yeah, and you got that with TikTok, and you got that exactly to your point with Shin, and suddenly you see it on the App Store chart, and you're like, what is that thing there, and why is it a bit, why is it ahead of Amazon in the App…
- ▶ 19:54 Benedict Evans So, you know, what do we think about, um, Amazon marketplace rollups and Shopify rollups?
- ▶ 32:04 Benedict Evans You know, even for Amazon, books are maybe, like, when they stopped disclosing media, I think media was 25% of their revenue, and that was, like, five years ago, and that was all media. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:50 Benedict Evans How do I think about whether I should be ranged on Amazon? 2 times in the scene
The Meta reality
- ▶ 6:15 Benedict Evans And so there's, for our incidentally for Facebook, just indeed is for Amazon, which is why things like, um, Kindle Fire and Alexa exist.
- ▶ 6:15 Benedict Evans And so there's, for our incidentally for Facebook, just indeed is for Amazon, which is why things like, um, Kindle Fire and Alexa exist.
Regulation - Who will notice?
- ▶ 11:10 Benedict Evans Or, you know, you can't invest in that because Microsoft might do that or because Amazon might do that.
'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- ▶ 41:59 Benedict Evans I suppose almost kind of the reason I wanted to do this as a topic was like, we spend so much time talking about Google and Apple and Facebook and Amazon.
- ▶ 42:11 Benedict Evans Um, the big part of Azure and AWS is digital transformation.
Tech in china, from inside and outside
- ▶ 22:06 Benedict Evans Just listening to you speak this, I'm reminded of a tweet that went viral sort of a year or two ago of somebody showing a picture of an Amazon copy of an Allbirds shoot. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:55 Benedict Evans Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-commerce.
- ▶ 46:48 Benedict Evans Um, and so you've got this sort of interesting hybrid that Google, Apple, uh, sorry, Google, Facebook, Amazon are not in China.
- ▶ 54:40 Benedict Evans Um, or they look more like eBay than they look like Amazon. 3 times in the scene
The Business of publishing
- ▶ 2:35 Jeremy White and then even try to do Kindle versions of the magazines as well, thinking this is where publishing was going, and this is where the model was, and we were going to walk towards these new digital consumers that wanted our titles, but in a…
- ▶ 10:39 Benedict Evans Which is where video advertising is, there's, there's, well, let me put it another way, there is search advertising where the core of search advertising is what you typed in, and it's sort of informed by lots of other data, but the core of… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:59 Jeremy White Through either from Amazon or either from the retailer or the brand itself, when you recommend a product to the reader and then they actually buy it and they get, you get a tiny percentage.
- ▶ 41:20 Benedict Evans There might be a filter on you go to a small online store that only decides to stop 10 things, but obviously Amazon has infinite product for practical purposes, but, you know, Net-A-Porter has
App stores: arguing like it's 2009
- ▶ 1:27 Benedict Evans If Uber existed, then it's not Amazon.
- ▶ 4:27 Benedict Evans And meanwhile, Apple will take 30% where they're not actually charging Amazon anything. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:47 Benedict Evans You have AWS cost.
- ▶ 24:53 Benedict Evans It would also come at Amazon Marketplace.
- ▶ 24:58 Benedict Evans And the basically part of the premise would be, like, if Uber kick you off the platform, or Airbnb kick you off the platform, or Amazon, or Apple, that's all sort of an aspect of the same question, and so we can have a rule that says there…
- ▶ 29:26 Benedict Evans This is a platform used by a billion people in exactly the same way that, you know, how does Amazon run Amazon marketplace is important.
- ▶ 29:26 Benedict Evans This is a platform used by a billion people in exactly the same way that, you know, how does Amazon run Amazon marketplace is important.
Shopify and digital transformation
- ▶ 2:31 Benedict Evans And in 2020, it was one hundred and twenty billion dollars, which makes it about 40%, a bit over 40% of Amazon Marketplace, which is where third parties can sell on Amazon. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:31 Benedict Evans And in 2020, it was one hundred and twenty billion dollars, which makes it about 40%, a bit over 40% of Amazon Marketplace, which is where third parties can sell on Amazon.
- ▶ 13:07 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, this is, it's funny when we talk about giant companies, about Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, people use this word platform, and so they've sort of forgotten what platform means. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:04 Benedict Evans So, I mean, it's very obviously Shopify versus, um, Amazon market. 12 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:37 Toni Cowan-Brown We should probably wrap up, but it looks like Amazon has acquired Cells, which is a third party marketplace. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:32 Benedict Evans And we had this, this observation, we talked about this before, that I looked at my shopping patterns on Amazon before I moved to Silicon Valley, and when I lived in London and worked in central London, I would go to the shops around me. 2 times in the scene
Clubhouse and the endless cycle of social apps
- ▶ 23:07 Benedict Evans Google compete with Bing or Amazon and Facebook.
Bezos and the Amazon machine
- ▶ 0:11 Benedict Evans We did have a different plan for what we were going to talk about, but given that, that Jeff Bezos, um, has designed to retire upstairs to be executive chairman, um, always an interesting title, uh, we thought we would talk about Amazon. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:16 Benedict Evans And I think that, that sense of building Amazon is maybe the sort of second thing that I wrote something about this sort of 18 months ago, and obviously you can get way too schematic in the way you describe these companies works. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:35 Benedict Evans That's just part of the internal API system in the same way that AWS is outside. 2 times in the scene