/lit/ - Literature

>>22795949
Not the best source, but a quick search showed:
>$220B revenue from online retail
>$117B revenue from "third party seller services," e.g. shipping and sponsored placement on the amazon website
>$80B from AWS
>$35B from ad sales
>$35B from prime subscriptions
>$19B from physical stores
>$4B from "other"
https://fourweekmba.com/amazon-profit-breakdown/

It's true that amazon makes most of their *profit* in AWS; they actually run their retail business at a loss. However, they're gradually increasing their cut of sales on the platform and pushing more of their store-brand products, which will increase profits going forward.

It's also worth reminding ourselves that retail is a notoriously competitive business with limited market growth and narrow margins. For example, Amazon's biggest retail competitor, Wal-Mart, has a much larger and more efficient distribution network, a much more efficient cost base, and a long head-start as a grocer. Even so, their gross margin is 24%. Retail just isn't a profitable business.

Cloud, on the other hand, is lucrative, growing, and non-zero-sum (most cloud vendors and consultants encourage you to do "multi-cloud," and park a copy of your database with each of the big 3 providers) market.

Retail is also much more logistically challenging. Commercial servers are shelf-stable, used or unused, for around 7-10 years. Contrast with a pint of milk, which goes bad in a few weeks if it's unsold.

So, naturally, it's easier to make money selling compute time than selling groceries.

>>22795276
Oracle and IBM provide open-source software as commercial vendors, and their clients still experience vendor lock-in. Even if every company was forced to open up their whole codebase, you'd still need the physical infrastructure and highly-skilled engineers to run a competing cloud platform -- a prohibitively high start-up cost for anyone but another large corporation. Then, you'd have to persuade customers to change vendors, presumably with a mix of features and price drops, lowering the potential profit of your venture relative to investing in an entrenched provider.

This might not scare away investors in a zero-interest-rate environment, but in the post-central-bank world most libertarians propose, capital would be even harder to come by than it is now, since the natural interest rate (i.e. without any state intervention) is close 20%, and has historically gone much higher.

Intellectual property rights do remarkably little in the software world. It's about contracts, strategic incompatibility, and other tactics that can't be prevented without antitrust legislation.

t. does tech for a living

>>22471542
like the cenobytes of hellraiser (adapted from the novella "the hellbound heart"), he guides people to pleasures so far beyond their understanding that they can't meaningfully consent. this is heroic to the utilitarian, evil to the kantian, and incomprehensible to the feminist.

>>20862722
Picrelated

>>20862827
When are the holidays finally over? These kids stress me out

Captcha: PNNNPN

>>10899630
Did I imply a contradiction? Something can be both absurd and accurate. This only makes intent difficult to discern.