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Google Advertising Businesses The Internet

Rivalry Building Between Amazon and Google 97

Posted by Soulskill from the bezos-to-fight-brin-in-single-combat dept.
Amazon and Google, both giants in the online business world, started out as separate entities with two very different agendas. As each has grown into an empire, the overlapping areas of business between the two companies has grown as well. But with both companies moving strongly into the electronic device market, cloud services, and Amazon now building out its advertising network, they find themselves increasingly at odds, and 2013 may bring more direct battles."Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset. So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision," said VC partner Chi-hua Chien. Adds Reuters, "Not long after Bezos learned of Google's catalog plans, Amazon began scanning books and providing searchable digital excerpts. Its Kindle e-reader, launched a few years later, owes much of its inspiration to the catalog news, the executive said. Now, Amazon is pushing its online ad efforts, threatening to siphon revenue and users from Google's main search website."
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Rivalry Building Between Amazon and Google

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  • Amazon (Score:3, Informative)

    by BlkRb0t ( 1610449 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @07:42PM (#42390847)
    While everyone is more interested in the rivalry of Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.

    • "Pack of Four" (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tuppe666 ( 904118 )

      While everyone is more interested in the rivalry of Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.

      Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.

      • Re:"Pack of Four" (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @08:02PM (#42390975)
        Speak for yourself. My business runs on Microsoft stuff. I couldn't give two shits about Facebook, Google, or Amazon.

        • Your business could be built on IBM and RedHat products. Doesn't change the fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon are now the biggest players in the online services & marketing market.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Really? I think you should pay attention to the actual world and quit listening to tech pundits who seem more concerned with shock value than fact. Facebook is in a fast decline and has been since before they went public. Microsoft is continuing to be fairly constant. My bet is that within 5 years (and I'm being liberal here with the time frame), Facebook is as relevant as myspace.

        • Facebook is in a fast decline and has been since before they went public. Microsoft is continuing to be fairly constant.

          Facebook is not in fast decline...its nearest competitor Google+ is still a ways of it threatening Facebook. Other than Facebook buying an Ad company. I have been astonished they have done *nothing*. As for Microsoft being constant, Google is getting serious about threatening their core product Office recently, while Microsoft failed in both search and mobile costing them Billions, and its new products Surface and Windows 8 have been disappointing they still print cash, but its for their undesirable utility

      • Re:"Pack of Four" (Score:5, Informative)

        by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @08:37PM (#42391185) Homepage

        Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.

        Facebook isn't in the same league as the big boys.

        Revenue for most recent quarter:

        • Apple: $36 billion
        • Microsoft: $16 billion
        • Google: $14 billion
        • Amazon: $14 billion
        • Facebook: $1.2 billion

        Facebook makes a lot of noise, but they're smaller than eBay, which had quarterly revenue around $4 billion, and about even with Yahoo.

        Amazon is the company with room to expand. Amazon could potentially take over most of retail. Their real competitor is Wal-Mart.

        The others are near the ceiling of their markets. Google has failed to make money with anything other than search ads. Microsoft probably has a long life ahead of it, like IBM, serving the needs of business. Apple has a price maintenance problem - their huge markups may not survive the flood of lower-priced devices. Facebook is in a bind; their user base has peaked, and shoving more ads at users didn't work out for Myspace.

        • I agree with you are saying, but there is one small problem in your post: you're dealing with revenues. It's better, but no sufficient, to talk using net profits or losses. For example, in their latest report Sony post a revenue of $20 billion. Would you consider them part of the "Pack of Four"? As much as I like (parts of) them, I wouldn't.

        • Oh, yeah. Nobody ever thinks about IBM anymore. Even though they're about to knock Microsoft off their perch as "third largest technology company by market capitalization." IBM probably likes it that way.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jhol13 ( 1087781 )

          Amazon started spämming me heavily this Christmas - before that they sent me one email per month, now one every day or so.

          I'll never ever buy anything from them.

      • Facebook is still small time imo. The fact they have to resort to pushing some pretty shit ads (gambling, betting, etc) just to get their money says they're not getting it because it appears they're just pushing any ad to anyone. There is no intelligence behind it otherwise they'd realise I'd never click on an ad for gambling. The only thing they have is a large audience and some claim they have a lock-in since people have put their lives into their system but the same thing could have been said about MySpa

        • Facebook is still small time imo. The fact they have to resort to pushing some pretty shit ads (gambling, betting, etc) just to get their money says they're not getting it because it appears they're just pushing any ad to anyone. There is no intelligence behind it otherwise they'd realise I'd never click on an ad for gambling. The only thing they have is a large audience and some claim they have a lock-in since people have put their lives into their system but the same thing could have been said about MySpace. Microsoft is losing some relevance but at least they still have products that people need and won't be as happy to replace.

          ...ask Google who threatens them more Microsoft or Facebook.

          • I'm still not sure that's the case. Google is in more trouble if Microsoft gets mobile devices right. The only thing outside of search/advertising that google have done well and can fall back on is mobile devices. Anyone who can take that away from them is a pretty big threat. They've just been lucky that Apple only cares about the high end of the market and Microsoft has largely been useless in portable computing.

            Facebook does indeed do advertising but given how many complaints there have been to how us

            • "if Microsoft gets mobile devices right"

              You speak as if Microsoft is a newcomer.
              They have botched the job for 15 years now.
              They would still be pushing WinCE 6.5 with minor tweaks if somebody else didn't show them how to make a real OS. And associated eco-system.

              • I've not used Windows Phone 7 for long enough to really know the UI, but I've played with enough devices to be impressed by the UI (Microsoft Research is the building behind me, so I see a lot of them). It's far from perfect, but then so are iOS and Android, and it's in the same ballpark. In contrast the old WinCE, was a usability disaster. I suspect that their biggest problem is that they only allow .NET code to run, which makes it hard to port code from other platforms to theirs.
              • I agree. The worst smart phone I ever owned was a Windows mobile phone. Trying to recreate windows on a phone was a dumb idea. Making it buggier than anything else was just retarded. That said they do appear to be getting better at it and as someone who owned a G1, android was a bit shit in the beginning too. If Microsoft keeps copying the right things and make it work well enough they could get lucky. Maybe they won't but Microsoft is still a compeitotor on office software too and they're very slowly getti

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft."

        In the slashdot world, maybe, but there is a huge place outside called "real world". You should check it sometime.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Alarash ( 746254 )
        Anybody thinking Facebook is more relevant than Microsoft is really, really wrong. Market capitalization doesn't mean much either when investors are creating a bubble. If FB is still worth a few billions in 10 years, then I might change my opinion.

    • "more resilient than that of any other" ? Come on, let's face it: the only resilient businesses are family-run businesses that have been doing the same thing for a century or so.

      In the .com field even the biggest players can go tits up (or more likely: taken over by another company) if they make a series of stupid decisions. As for Amazon, I'd guess they do fine because they're well.. actually selling stuff. Like, physical items. And many of them (duh). Unlike companies that deal in virtual goods / servi

    • Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.

      I'm not going to say Amazon does not have a good base, they obviously do (I'm a prime member myself and plan to keep being so for a long time).

      But Amazon has "only" 40 billion of cash on hand (or cash + cash equiv anyway). Apple has lots more than that. I would also say both Apple and Amazon have bases that are just as strong, with Apple having the slight edge overall simply because of the larger f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EdIII ( 1114411 )

        Amazon has not been impressing me.

        Netflix was down for over 24hrs due to a nationwide failure in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It came back up slowly in different places, but my area was dead last. Netflix even had their help page 404'd because of how many people were calling in.

        Wasn't Netflix the one who came out with the platform to stress test your cloud infrastructure? ChaosMonkey? All that testing and disaster readiness did not seem to help all that much. Hard to make a difference when Amazon is down

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          Netflix is 1/3 of the USA Internet traffic during peak. I don't think you understand the scale. No matter what Netflix does, they have to do it via "cloud". Be it a 3rd party like Amazon, or creating their own infrastructure, it will be almost identical in the end. The main benefit of using Amazon is Netflix doesn't have to re-create the whole wheel.

          Amazon already has billions upon billions invested into infrastructure and Netflix would have to re-create that if they want any hope of handling 1/3 of the U

    • While everyone is more interested in the rivalry of Google, Apple and Microsoft, Amazon has steadily charted up year after year building a base that is more resilient than that of any other.

      Posted on a day where on of the biggest Amazon customers (Netflix) -- and all of their customers -- might have something to say about that "resilience".

    • Until Amazon fixes their search, Google has absolutely nothing to worry about.

  • The key is to keep the titans fighting... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For us, rather than working together to smash us down with their mighty clubs.

    Keep at it boys, keep at it.

  • I have to sideload the amazon app store on my android devices if I want it.
    This does not take a rocket scientist to figure out.

  • Lets call it competition (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @07:52PM (#42390915)

    The reality of the new world order, is the "pack of four" do have massive overlap in business, but that is just the way it should be. Its good old fashioned competition. Everyone has a store; Everyone had apps; Everyone owns an advertising company, Everyone has hardware [Ok Facebook only rumoured since forever, and Amazon new rumoured around a phone].

    Personally I think the consumer needs to protected with cross platform; patent free formats, and the ability to move between devices as easily [and I mean Apps too] as possible to protect consumers from being locked into any one ecosystem.

    • I guess I'm not much blown away by this. Companies looking for the big money go wherever the big money is.

      Soon banks will be into banking, stocks,derivatives, commodities, overthrowing small countries, buying out large countries. You know, business as usual.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gutnor ( 872759 )
      You do not really need patent free format. Just a guarantee that your stuff will be migrated, just like your phone number. While we are at it, that would be cool if we could have some service guarantee, like that your account will not be abruptly closed with no explanation (like you post some idiotic video on youtube and Google wipes everything you own with them - a few instances have made the news here with Google, but I'm sure that's a problem with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, ...)

      • You do not really need patent free format. Just a guarantee that your stuff will be migrated,

        ...because I'm not happy replacing a Monopoly with a cartel! I really like your post, I was more focused on offline paid content [books; movies; Apps] forgetting that if anything there is as much content [yours and commercial] in the cloud, but I suspect caring Governments should be protecting "the people from themselves" as people do not seem to understand how much of their ownership over their lives they have given to these mega-corps.

  • Based on yesterday's Amazon AWS outage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @07:54PM (#42390931) Homepage Journal

    Amazon AWS hosts Netflix and it was done for hours yesterday. Based on that I'd say +1 Google in the systems reliability front.

  • Once again we are caught in the middle... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by petscii ( 318753 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @07:56PM (#42390955)

    I don't torrent. I bought programs from amazon unbox service. I thought paying $1.99 for programs was fair... OK, I have to wait until the next day because the broadcast networks/cable people have an anti consumer bent towards people "buying" media from them. I'll spare you the rant about the the people who watch the shows being the product vs the shows themselves.

    What is hugely obnoxious is that Amazon is using its position to punish people. You can't get the amazon player for android even though you can get it for the Kindle (which is based on android) and surprise you can get it for the iPad. So none of the content that I paid for will work on my Nexus 7.

    Now I just wait for the DVD sets to hit the library.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      there is an apk of the player that is on kindle floating on the pirate bay. go grab it and install it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by iamhassi ( 659463 )
      Apple took the smart approach and stuck with excellent software and hardware. Apple invented the modern smartphone and tablet market. Apple will sit back and watch everyone else destroy themselves while apple continues to integrate with whatever new service allows it. Google, Amazon or Facebook or all of them will eventually self implode, will Apple sits back and says WTF?

      Smart move Apple, giving people what they want, instead of stuffing your own services down their face.

      • Smart move Apple, giving people what they want, instead of stuffing your own services down their face.

        That worked so well with Ping and Apple Maps ~

    • So far, Amazon still has a better track record of providing access to content obtained from them on others' devices. Kindle and Amazon MP3 apps are both available on pretty much every mainstream desktop and mobile OS, and some more obscure ones (heck, they have a WP7 app!). Instant Video is available on iOS. Furthermore, both Instant Video and MP3 let you download your files in a non-DRM'd format, multiple times at that, so that they can be played in any regular player - compare it to Play Music and Play Vi

    • So none of the content that I paid for will work on my Nexus 7.

      Funny, I watch Amazon Instant Video just fine on my Nook Tablet. Granted...I have to use the browser and no fancy app, but it does work. Have you tried watching Amazon through the web browser? Perhaps bookmark the page to make it one click away?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rysc ( 136391 ) *

      This is why I *do* torrent. I'm perfectly happy to buy when someone will sell me what I want, but when they won't *I'm going to get it anyway*, let the anti-consumer business beware. If what I want is a video I own and can watch whenever and wherever, and keep in my personal archive, then I'm going to get it no matter what laws they buy or technical restrictions they try to enforce. There's nothing immoral about having it your way and I'm going to continue to vote with my economic feet by not buying from th

  • Ironic (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @08:05PM (#42390987)

    Recently as part of Googles defence against Microsofts smear campaign against "Shopping search monopoly" Amzason where given as an example of where 40% of shoppers go first.

  • Cyberpunk (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quakeulf ( 2650167 ) on Tuesday December 25, 2012 @08:05PM (#42390991)
    I hope we will see the rise of cyberpunk with real competing technology businesses with their own secret task-forces and total disregard for human life in order to turn a profit and curb their competition!
    • They could build a peer to peer marketplace, where users have ratings and very easy to create product pages. Take away the fees for transaction and you will beat Amazon and Google. Anyone can copy Amazon and ebay into one, make it with 3% commission rate and beat out the competition, while improving the shopping for the masses.

  • Which is the more evil? Just advertising? Or stealing person info and selling it, or placing ads based on it?

  • If only it were Chihuahua... chien is "dog" in French :)

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