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  • This video is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club.

  • Use the link in the description for a special $5 starter set.

  • On February 28th, 2017, you might've thought the internet was down.

  • 4 hours without Netflix, Spotify, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Dropbox, Pinterest, Imgur, League,

  • Tinder, and thousands of others,

  • Even the site that reports outages.

  • That's embarrassing.

  • If the world was more productive that day, now we know why.

  • r/Outside become, just, ya know, outside.

  • A shark hadn't bitten an underwater cable, nor was it five/nine, Just an Amazon engineer's

  • typo.

  • Probably a stressful afternoon in Seattle, but also an impressive demonstration of the

  • company's size and power:

  • Amazon Web Services hosts so much of the internet that for many people, myself included, it

  • basically is the internet.

  • We know Amazon as an online store, Companies store their products in its warehouses, which

  • handle the marketing, and shipping, and returns.

  • For us, this means total convenience - one click away from $125, 27-pound gummy bear

  • pythons, or 5, crisp, 2 dollar bills for $20.

  • Wait, that's not how money works

  • A hundred thousand companies make over a hundred thousand dollars a year this way.

  • But for Amazon, it's only a fraction of their business.

  • There's also Twitch, Whole Foods, Kindle, Alexa sensibly named Echo, Echo Plus, Echo

  • Dot, Echo Dot Kids, Amazon Tap, Echo Connect, Echo Spot, Echo Show, and Echo Look, also

  • a completely different Alexa, Fire Tablets and TV, Prime Music, Video, Pantry, Ring Doorbell,

  • Zappos, IMDb, Fresh, GoodReads, and over 70 consumer brands you'd never know they owned.

  • whew.

  • Hardly a month goes by where they don't enter and dominate a new industry,

  • Just trademarking the sloganWe do the prep.

  • You be the chef.” was enough to drop Blue Apron's stock 12%.

  • They're even investigating pharmaceuticals, education, and finance.

  • Amazon defines its competitors aspublishers, producers, and distributors of physical, digital,

  • and interactive media of all types and all distribution channels”, among others.

  • That's, like, everyone.

  • Which raises the question: is Amazonscatter-brained?

  • Many of these products have nothing in common.

  • Yesterday they wanted to conquer streaming video.

  • Today, sell organic grapes in grocery stores.

  • Tomorrow, who knows?

  • And their ideas, increasingly let's say, creative: 2-day delivery?

  • How about 2-hour delivery, a 3D smartphone, a grocery store without employees, a front

  • door that unlocks for delivery drivers, A flying warehouse complete with detachable

  • drones.

  • For all its success as an online store, more and more, it also seems distracted.

  • At least, that's how it looks.

  • The only way to make sense of their actions and mistakes, and anticipate their future,

  • is to see the world as they do.

  • And there are three pillars to Amazon's plan for world domination:

  • To really understand Amazon you have to understand Jeff Bezos

  • Like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, the philosophy of the man is that of the company.

  • Apple was founded by people in love with technology and its design.

  • No matter how big the company gets, this will always be reflected in its decisions, priorities,

  • even mistakes.

  • Amazon began as a bookstore, but that was never its heart and soul.

  • or spine

  • Bezos chose books because no one bookstore could hold all of them, warehouses visited

  • on the internet could.

  • But make no mistake: They aren't a book company, a website, a delivery network, or

  • even a retailer.

  • Amazon is a scale company.

  • Bezos understood that when you take something and multiply it a hundred, thousand, million

  • times, you can do things all the small businesses in the world never could.

  • A tree is a tree.

  • But put 400 billion together and you have the Amazon rainforest, a force so powerful

  • it controls the world's climate.

  • From any other company, this sounds like generic business-speak.

  • But Amazon really means it.

  • We say a company is focused if it specializes in beverages, or cars, or bad website design,

  • and puts all its XP into that ability.

  • Amazon is rare in that its specialty isn't the product itself but its scale.

  • That's the focus.

  • When considering a new product, the flowchart is pretty simple: “Would this benefit from

  • being a thousand times quicker, bigger, easier?”

  • If so, you can bet Amazon either sells it, or soon will.

  • It's easy to stop there, Sit back and enjoy the profit.

  • But Amazon asksOkay, now what can we do?”

  • And this is why it's unstoppable: the snowball effect.

  • First, get as many users as possible.

  • Give out $50 tablets, free shipping, license Echo to every company willing.

  • More users bring more data, which helps improve the product.

  • And the better product attracts even more users.

  • They aren't just making it easy to live off Amazon, they're making it hard not to.

  • That's the power of data in the hands of someone operating at this scale.

  • It's why there's now a movement to limit this,

  • why companies like Digi.me, who I've previously mistaken for a data collection company, actually

  • let users manage and safeguard their information.

  • And the results are things like Prime: It may lose money on the heaviest shoppers, but

  • with a hundred million of them, they're winning a lot more than they're losing.

  • So why purchase competitors like Whole Foods?

  • Exactly because it's not what they're good at:

  • Books never expire, well, some do.

  • But groceries, not so much.

  • You have to go back repeatedly, putting Amazon in your routine.

  • And with so much shipping,

  • Spending $11 billion fulfilling 300 million packages in 2015, they can do something almost

  • no-one else can: Compete with UPS and FedEx.

  • They already lease 32 Boeing 767 cargo jets, and plan a massive cargo hub in Kentucky,

  • But that's just the beginning.

  • After announcing a new $79 Kindle, Bezos wrote

  • There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and

  • those that work hard to charge customers less.

  • Both approaches can work.

  • We are firmly in the second camp.”

  • And he's really not kidding

  • The parts alone cost $78.59, plus $5.66 for assembly.

  • That's a loss of $5.25 for every Kindle sold, not including things like marketing,

  • licensing, and support.

  • And sure, there are ads, but only as an option,

  • Companies like Facebook and YouTube are fundamentally advertising companies.

  • No matter how well-intentioned YouTube employees are, unless something drastic changes, the

  • company will always prioritize advertisers over creators.

  • That's the business model.

  • And then there are customer companies - where You and I decide what gets demonetized.

  • Apple is comfortable charging more forhe very best experience,

  • And for Amazon, helping the customer means making us pay as little as possible.

  • Both are loved in a way that's impossible for an advertising company.

  • You might say - “They only care about the customer to make more money

  • And maybe you're right, there's no way to know, but the effects are the same,

  • When Apple refused to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone,

  • When Amazon takes a loss for the sake of our wallets,

  • and offers some of the best customer support I've ever had,

  • It may only be a calculated business decision, But it's great for us.

  • Of course, when the customer comes first, everyone else comes second.

  • Employees can be easily be forgotten in this never-ending quest to satisfy us.

  • Here's how Bezos describes it:

  • One thing I love about customers is that they're divinely discontent.

  • Their expectations are never static.

  • It's human nature.

  • We didn't ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied.”

  • This is the hedonic treadmill - no matter how much our lives improve, our expectations

  • simply adjust.

  • Almost any other company would resent this - constantly having to improve their products,

  • even the rate at which they improve.

  • But Amazon embraces it - they're just as discontent as we are.

  • Except, if there are billions to be made by concentrating on scale and customers, why

  • can't anybody else do the same?

  • How can a tiny online bookstore do something exponentially better than Walmart, the world's

  • largest company by revenue?

  • It's easy to think of the CEO as the supreme leader of a company

  • butEven Bono Has A Boss”.

  • In this case, shareholders.

  • The longer a company loses money, the greater its risk, and the more anxious get investors.

  • But for Amazon - lack of profit isn't just tolerated, it's celebrated -

  • They could stop and make a dollar, they'd rather wait and make five, Using profit from

  • things like AWS to fund projects like Kindle and Echo.

  • Because Bezos is so open about this, shareholders sign off, and they can think far into the

  • future.

  • Those cargo planes?

  • Not so cheap.

  • But that doesn't stop Amazon.

  • Supermarkets operate at a 1% profit margin - but Amazon can buy Whole Foods, and actually

  • lower prices.

  • It also gives them freedom to experiment.

  • The Fire Phone was never ready for, ahem Prime time, but that's a small price to pay for

  • this strategy.

  • MoviePass, Snapchat, Uber, Spotify, Blue Apron, all starving companies following in Amazon's

  • footsteps, crossing their fingers money will come later.

  • Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Amazon is already Google's biggest competitor.

  • AWS competes with Google Cloud, Echo with Google Home, Prime and Express, YouTube and

  • Twitch Even search.

  • A company this diversified will face plenty of challenges,

  • A lot will change in 10 years, but we'll always want low prices, fast delivery, and

  • easy shopping.

  • As Amazon conquers one industry after another,

  • they may only have one real competitor: the government, who may sayDo not pass go,

  • and do not collect $200”.

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亞馬遜的大理論 (The Grand Theory of Amazon)

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