jpao79

My thought is that if you like to see them inline/unified, then you could head directly to amazon-marketplace.com where they are all commingled like they currently are.

Amazon should (and still can while there's still time before some major negative social media event) split their website, reviews, search and fulfillment inventory to make it clear what you are getting/who you are buying from.

amazon.com -> the original trusted amazon, fulfilled by amazon with strict inventory management

marketplace.amazon.com -> wild west'e-bay style', 'get what you get and don't get upset' amazon

[Addition based on comment] Or maybe amazon-marketplace.com to further differentiate it. It'd be similar to how Netflix split into netflix.com and dvd.com (although I think they should have branded it netflix-dvd.com for branding purposes).

I think what's also interesting is that now that Microsoft is awake with Nadella at the helm and presenting a viable alternative, will Amazon's cloud business start losing marketshare.

If I were say, Procter and Gamble/Clorox (Consumer Staples), Macy's (Consumer Discretionary), Visa/Fedex (E-Commerce), Aetna (Healthcare) if I were going to look at options for cloud, would I host my enterprise on Amazon who is actively trying compete with me and provide the end customer with alternatives to my product/services? Or would I go with a vertical pure play cloud services provider like Microsoft.

Yes, in someways it feels like if Visa claimed that it handles 99.99% of all online retailing and showing revenue numbers based on the entire retail sales transaction and not just on the 1.5% processing fee.

To a certain extent, Amazon's retail presence is 68% Marketplace (from the article). Marketplace is really just a very high scale website plus very high scale order fulfillment which nets an analogous 6%-15% fee for listing, inventory storage and shipping/returns.

And on top of that, what happens when the bricks and mortar store goes out of business and you have nowhere to go when Amazon is not sending it to you and "need it urgently".

Sometimes I shop at the local BestBuy to delay that inevitable day when Amazon is the only thing available.

The environmentalist in me is thinking a single billionaire's carbon impact is probably lower than a 1,000 millionaire's carbon impact. A single billionaire (say Warren Buffet) has a consumption of probably $200,000 a year with the remainder held in investments. A 1,000 millionaire's consumption is probably also $100,000 a year, with the remainder held in investments. So the 1,000 millionaires have basically about 500x the environmental impact than a single billionaire.

More fair points. And, yes at the individual level, I agree, a higher wage, trickle up approach seems better/fairer than a trickle down approach.

However, at the macro level, the environmentalist in me worries, at the extreme end if wealth really was fully distributed and everyone was living like Richard Branson, Imelda Marcos, etc. with multiple houses in every city (each with a 4 bedroom layout, TVs and wet bar in every room and an SUV in every garage), a yacht, a private jet guzzles premium fuel and a private island, the environmental ramifications would be disastrous.

I agree with the other commenters on this subthread that buybacks are most often times simply a more tax efficient way of handing back profits to shareholders. I think it's a good thing that companies share profit gains with shareholders. At a certain point, well run and well focused companies can saturate their market domain but still have amazing fundamentals.

You have to ask yourself, particularly as a shareholder but also a member of society, do you want the company to extend into other industries where they could not only be over-extending themselves beyond their core competency but also over-exposing themselves to macro-economics, geo-politics and anti-trust issues.

Do we want all companies to chase monopolies in multiple domains like Amazon? Should Verizon/Comcast/etc. use its monopoly profits from telecom to go after media, then cloud computing and then conquer consumer goods and healthcare or should it just return profits to share holders? If the money goes back to the shareholder, then the shareholder can go find the category leader in those other domains and invest it more wisely.

That said buybacks can definitely be manipulated by some management teams to game their compensation, which is a definitely bad thing.

There is likely some truth to this as it encourages new housing stock to be built. I also suspect that it does lead to a more sustainable long term growth that's less likely to have major sell offs since owners will hold onto their property to maintain their tax advantage. I openly wonder if this is the reason that California housing, particularly in the Bay Area, did not implode during the dotcom bubble.

So some random thoughts on the case for this time its actually different are:

1.) The internet and computing has increased the flow of information. Investments in data mining and data science by the Fed lets it make better decisions and test stuff iteratively and react to changes faster. Companies can also track inventory in a more controlled manner and not build too much too fast. Employees can find prevailing wage information easier to find better, more productive jobs. Home buyers can see how overvalued their houses are relative to other cities.

The internet and computing is enabling a much higher control loop (a.k.a. a steeper gradient descent toward optimal economic output based on the production needs for the current population).

2.) Steady reduction in the reliance on oil and gas. Much of the crazy inflation in past cycles was due to oil and gas shortages.

Would love to get opinions and more cases for why its different.