Amazon Beats Microsoft In 'The Battle of Seattle' (usatoday.com) 109
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned $5 billion in one afternoon when the company's stock price jumped 9.6%. Amazon reported an actual profit of $513 million (nearly double the amount expected), and next year Amazon's sales are projected by analysts to be 63% higher than Microsoft's, which USA Today calls "a good illustration of how growth in the sector has moved from hardware, software and chip companies to Internet firms selling goods or advertising online... [W]hile Bill Gates helped put Seattle area on the map as a U.S. tech hub, Bezos now runs the largest tech company in the State of Washington, by far, in terms of sales."
Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool.
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world. But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.
Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool.
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world. But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.
Not Surprised... (Score:2)
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Taxes? We're too big to pay taxes!
Washington State has no corporate income tax. Amazon pays all the federal income tax that they are legally required to pay, which hasn't been much, because they have not had much profit. If you don't like our tax system, then write to your congressperson, or vote for Bernie. Blaming Amazon is silly.
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There's a BO tax here to discourage startups.
Couldn't they avoid that tax by using deodorant, or by showering more frequently?
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You could ask the same about H1-Bs.
The answer is apparently a resounding "no".
Out of State plates (Score:4, Interesting)
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qualify for residency
If your fleet management unit is operated as a subsidiary (even wholly owned), they could be home based in whatever state they want and license their vehicles there. I know of a couple of construction services companies that license vehicles in either Florida or Texas. They shuffle them around enough so they can claim that the vehicles don't spend a majority of their time in Washington state and ???? Profit!
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Thanks for reminding me to renew my tabs, I almost forgot. I live just north of Seattle and it was only about $50. I don't see the issue. It would cost more in gas to switch the cars.
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Not a real issue. Out of state plates are really not the big deal they used to be when WA had one of the highest yearly excise taxes in America and people would try to get away with licensing their stuff in Oregon where fees were lower. Now they are fairly modest--especially compared to California, which taxes the shit out of vehicles. I used to pay $1,000 a year to license my car here. Now it's about $70 or so. So "tax avoidance" is not the issue here. If the vehicles are leased, that would probably explai
That's only one factor (Score:1)
We should probably look at the total cost of the vehicle, including purchasing and insurance.
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On top of that you have money tied up in a depreciating asset.
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The bigger issues here is that the federal government has original jurisdiction on this which is also why all those agencies and departments don't know what to say. The feds via the interstate commerce clause has declared any vehicle with a gross weight rating of 10,001lbs or more is a commercial vehicle and subject to to their jurisdiction except when certain rules are followed. It gets extremely complicated from here because states are allowed to create their own laws unless they conflict with federal ru
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Growth = Progress = Entropy (Score:1)
I find the most amazing insights on Slashdot. Will you tell us more about this?
Ridiculous fluff (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's profit in one quarter is greater than the sum of all profits ever achieved by Amazon through their entire existence. To claim that Amazon has somehow "won" some battle is ridiculous when you're talking about revenue, not profits. They have to do something about their profit margins if they're going to turn revenue into profit...
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Irrelevant. Shares do not represent a percent of votes. The number of shares is itself arbitrary and changeable. For instance, it can do a stock split, or it can simply issue new shares and dilute the current ones.
The company can even render your vote irrelevant after the fact. There are laws against being egregious here, but in principle 51% of the company can vote to issue bonus shares to that same 51%. Usually in exchange for money (capital investment), although occasionally a part of an acquisition. Bo
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I think he meant that one share of company X isn't necessarily the same percentage as one share of Y Inc.
Likewise, X might be at $12 and Y might be $500. Is Y better if it was at $600 last week and X was at 10? Could go either way.
Before I even read it I figured the article was a load of crap.
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It's actually almost insane that we still give shares a nominal value, precisely because it is utterly meaningless. The question for an investor is not what the share value is, it's what the actual value is.
The question for an investor is how much profit can I make when these numbers change. It's not what a company is "actually" worth, since that seems to have so little influence on stock price. It's what a company is perceived to be worth. As we know, the market works not on reality, but on the perception of reality.
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The big powerhouse in the Puget Sound area is Boeing, a LOT of smaller businesses provide good manufacturing jobs supporting the Lazy-B. Aerospace is big in the Northwest, living wage jobs and good engineering jobs, a nice mix to have in an area.
I don't see so much so for Amazon or Microsoft.
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Maybe because of where I work we get all the laid-off Boeing workers. And you wonder why we can't get seats delivered in time!
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The main error in the article, Amazon is not a tech company, Amazon is a logistic company that uses tech. They are now extending that logistics into handling digital materials but still focused on being a logistics company.
Amazon has a break in the market because the other big logistics companies have failed to expand into and compete with Amazons model which will happen eventually and this will hurt Amazons revenue.
M$ has choked the chicken on it's market, really badly and nothing will ever come of it
It's also bull because the CEO was paid only $80k (Score:1)
The summary is also misleading in saying that "Amazon CEO made ...". He was paid $80,000 for being CEO.
Separately, he was also the principal investor in the company at its founding, the owner of company. The OWNERS/investors made made money (on paper) when the stock went up. That has nothing to do with whether he's the CEO, or even works there.
To make that more clear, I founded a company about 20 years ago. About four years ago, I got burned out on being CEO, so I quit working for that company and got a
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If you want to be a man and not a little boy, you can admit that you were wrong and should do your own homework before you judge others.
Geez, man why the abuse?
I worked briefly at Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1990s. I was feeling wistful from your comment about how much things had changed over the years, remembering when Yahoo was actually a king. (A friend of mine told me he remembers when Yahoo's address still contained stanford.edu.) Usenet, FTP, HotWired.com, Napster...
That seems to me like the real substance of this discussion. Anyways, thanks for your thoughts on Digital Equipment Corporation.
___
Long live the
First non-Amazon device was a Raspberry Pi. (Score:2)
Too late on the "Echo on a non-Amazon device": Amazon Echo DIY with a Raspberry Pi [raspberrypi.org]
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I'm surprised Oracle haven't sued them for copying their business model.
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I'm making $35k a year after nine years with a Microsoft vendor. It's hard to afford your own place while making that.
Jesus, $35k per year after nine years? Please say that is some kind of tier 1 customer service, or serving food or something.
The GP must live in the Midwest or something.
While the GP was being a jerk about it, he was certainly insunuating that the AC must be someone who still had trouble paying a few thousand for his dwelling after decades in the IT industry. It is probably accurate that someone with over 20 years experience who has trouble paying $3500 per month in rent does not have the expertise to identify the *best* developers at Microsoft.
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It's a $3,500 a month two bedroom overlooking Elliott Bay, and I have my own bedroom. Plus, parking is $380 per month per space. Could you afford that by yourself?
$3500 per month is not that much for successful IT personnel. Paying 50% of take home on rent is not uncommon in city areas, which only comes to a salary of about $125k per year. Even in the Midwest that isn't very high for someone with about 10 years of experience. Certainly anyone skilled enough to identify the *best* Microsoft developers makes much more than that.
that's nothing (Score:2)
Starbucks on the other hand beat both their profits combined with billions in profit last year. I certainly helps that many people are addicted to caffeine.
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I certainly helps that many people are addicted to caffeine.
It helps even more that "fair trade" price for coffee beans is only about 3 cents per cup of coffee, and it costs even less to burn them, which is what Starfucks does when they claim to be "roasting" coffee. I suppose it also helps that people dumb enough to drink their coffee have too unsophisticated a palate to tell that the beans were burnt to fuck.
Did OP mean they are biggest employers in Ireland (Score:3)
Because their US divisions are making a loss year after year, and have no [taxable] income at all
High revenue doesn't mean high profits (Score:2)
There are plenty of companies with higher revenues than Microsoft (eg most oil companies, Wal*Mart, etc.). That doesn't mean higher profits though. Amazon sells so much stuff, it was inevitable their revenues would increase. But their profit margins are pretty small.
Revenue != size (Score:2)
Amazon is the last in a long line of middlemen that make up a supply chain. Anyone who is silly enough to measure companies by revenue is naturally going to have a bias that makes them think that retailers are "bigger" than manufacturing and engineering companies. What matters isn't the revenue that passes through a company, but the profit that they get to keep.
I'm not trying to put down Amazon - they're a very successful company and probably one day they'll be bigger than Microsoft. But not today.
Selling $1 bills for $0.95 (Score:2)
They all fall eventually (Score:2)
Amazon, Inc. is the new Sears & Roebuck Co.
Some decades from now we'll see them closing up too. It will probably happen shortly after Jeff Bezos retires.
These companies seem to run on the drive and personality of their founding CEO. We're already seeing Microsoft crumble away after the exit of Bill Gates, arguable he checked out mentally long before he officially left. Apple may follow a similar trend downward without Steve Jobs.
I predict that Bezos may only want to run the Amazon machinery for another
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You should buy before the peak and sell before the crash.
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