The case for ending Amazon’s dominance
The author laments the rarity, excellence and thus dominance of companies like Amazon, although this article could have been about Apple or Google too.<p>Rather than ponder to what extent if any government regulation is the answer, it&#x27;d be better to ask <i>why</i> Amazon is so dominant and <i>why</i> competitors have such a difficult time competing.<p>This isn&#x27;t specific to Amazon. &quot;Disruption&quot; is a word that has come to mean tech firms, which we can roughly define as firms founded by computer programmers that make heavy use of computers, entering a new market and rapidly out competing the incumbents. These firms start with no particular competitive advantage and frequently have major disadvantages. When Bezos started selling books he had no knowledge of the books business, no warehouses, no logistics operation, no business relationships and no capital beyond his own savings and $300k his parents invested in the business. His <i>only</i> edge was that Bezos had a computer science education and knew programming. Despite starting with literally nothing, Amazon now controls most of the entire book sales market. There was a story on HN recently about how Barnes and Noble is basically giving up and laying off employees.<p>Same thing for Steve Jobs and phones or Google and mapping. All relatively mature industries, all obliterated the incumbents (well, in phones the incumbents only survived by adopting Android wholesale). But Amazon is the best example because retail is such an old and established industry.<p>I&#x27;ve come to think that a big part of this is down to the different way programmers think, vs regular &#x27;business people&#x27;. Any of the existing retail giants could have built an Amazon. Bezos didn&#x27;t have any unique eureka-moment patent or other moat. And they all started way ahead of him in having warehouses and distribution networks. But they didn&#x27;t, they never successfully did that, I don&#x27;t think they ever <i>could</i>, because they were run by people who weren&#x27;t software developers.<p>There are two big parts to this:<p>1. Understanding software projects and software developers.<p>2. Clarity, precision and energy of thought.<p>(1) is obvious enough, people with a business background can&#x27;t judge the skill of developers or quality of software directly so they have to rely heavily on proxies that aren&#x27;t very good - things like &quot;is this project hitting its projected deadlines&quot; which projects never do, or &quot;what are other companies doing&quot; which creates herd behaviour and eliminates edge, or &quot;is this solution backed by IBM or Microsoft&quot;. They tend to make basic errors like saying, well this company over in India says they&#x27;ll write the software we need for 1&#x2F;10th the cost of our own development team, and software is software so that&#x27;s a great saving! And they don&#x27;t understand the vast gulf in skills and quality of the possible outcomes, or how critical quality tech is to their business.<p>(2) is more controversial, but I can&#x27;t escape the feeling that programmers tend to think a lot more clearly and rigorously than many business people. Writing software demands intense focus and concentration for long periods, very precise thinking, and computers cannot tolerate internally inconsistent thinking. Way too many people simply cannot or will not actually think things through in detail. Their thinking is often vague, contradictory, shallow and they are constantly looking for clever ways to get out of thinking at all, like by outsourcing their thought to consultants or repeating buzzwords they don&#x27;t really understand (IoT, AI etc).<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that programmers are incapable of self delusion, woolly thinking or anything like that - I&#x27;ve seen plenty of dumb behaviour from supposedly smart people. It&#x27;s more like maybe they <i>can</i> do it, if they are reasonably free of biases and are given enough time and are motivated enough.<p>But if it&#x27;s true that programming improves your general capacity for thought then we should expect to see tech firms systematically out-compete every firm in which the playing field is level and not radically tipped in favour of incumbents by regulators and governments. Retail is not very regulated so no surprise that Amazon is systematically taking over.<p><i>Edit:</i> SpaceX is a better example of Amazon-style disruption than Apple. Musk went from knowing computer programming and nothing about space at all, to radically disrupting the existing aerospace industry with reusable rockets, in less than 20 years.