Amazon has scaled indefinitely by treating every product as an interchangeable packet, and by not caring what they are, only what they weigh. At a fundamental level, it doesn’t know what it sells. What would happen if it could change that?
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We’ve been arguing about app stores for a decade, but now the EU is going to change the rules. Will that actually matter, or is it just a $10bn wealth transfer to a few games companies?
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As we come out of lockdown, UK ecommerce penetration is 50% higher than the USA. What does that do to retail, and to startups, if it sticks?
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Can we get content moderation to work, or is it as much of a dead end as virus scanning? Do we need to change the whole model of social instead?
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Retailers have sold private label products for a century or more. Is something different when Amazon does it?
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When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.
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People talk a lot about AWS as Amazon’s cash cow, but the ad business buried in the back of the accounts might be just as profitable.
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We’ve been arguing about newspaper business models for a decade, and none of the questions have changed, but now things are heating up. Should internet platforms ‘pay for news content’, and is this a competition problem, or is this really a tax on links, and a subsidy?
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Consumers spent $120bn on Shopify in 2020 - double the figure for 2019 and over 40% of Amazon’s competing business. What does that tell us about competing with Amazon? Problems that were already solved? And most of all, about brands and consumers going direct?
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What happens when rent, returns and advertising blur into one? What would it mean to do ecommerce that doesn’t scale?
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