A long time ago the best talent from PhD programs tended to stay in academia. That was considered the “prize.” Over the last 15 years or so the tables have really turned. Not saying top people don’t stay, but I now see much if not most of the top talent continuing their careers in the private sector or elsewhere. We’re in an era where the most cutting edge and impactful research increasingly does not take place at academic institutions. Between that and the vastly different compensation structures in the private sector it’s not too surprising top people want to go elsewhere.
As someone mentioned to me recently “Success in academia is defined by publishing papers mostly read only by a few other people that define success as publishing papers. Success outside academia is defined by doing amazing $&@! that has a measurable impact on the world.”
That's a bit biased. I could argue the other extreme by highlighting the quest for truth aspect in academia, the freedom from market influence and safety to pursue wherever the interesting research takes you etc.
Contrast that with working at an adtech giant to increase measurable engagement by applying some amazing $&@! that make users addicted and miserable, your workers burned out and the upper classes even richer. Or work on some prototype that never gets in the hands of users, either because it's just a PR stunt pet project for a higher-up or it gets killed off for internal company politics reasons.
You can pick your narrative by picking which academic and industry position to focus on. You can do awesome stuff at both and be miserable at both.
The top of the top usually do both at the same time. They spend part time at a top university, but also advise top companies with top research groups.
You are confounding two things. The impact of research and the impact of the researcher.
Increasingly more research is done in publicly funded academia, not the opposite at you claim. OTOH the relative impact of individual researchers has gone down, but this is mostly due to problems being tackled being increasingly harder.
In industry you can have relatively more impact because you are not doing research but you are building things using knowledge somebody has already collected for you. Maybe that is what you wanted to say.
LinkedIn seems to be populated mostly with people looking to impress other people on LinkedIn. Problem is the only people truly active are those trying to impress others and the people all these folks are trying to impress aren’t there (apart from logging in once a year to update their current position or profile.)
The fact that static old school servers in the cloud are more expensive than hosting it yourself is news to precisely nobody. That’s not the business case for the cloud. In 2020 if your tech stack is still a monolith of giant servers on a rack somewhere you’ve got far bigger problems in your future.
The numbers you describe are an opportunity but also a big risk. The problem with these app-based businesses is that there’s little brand loyalty. They spend a ton of money to create a market and customer base and round about the time they start making money a copycat comes along and customers flip. It becomes a race to the bottom. Few would dispute the profit that could come from holding onto a user for years. Many will dispute the likelihood that this will actually happen.
2) Because the assets are not liquid the “value” of the assets is highly debatable. (Value of your stock portfolio vs private equity holdings).
3) Some assets are not free to own. Simple example being property. It’s worth a lot but also costs a lot (taxes, Maint, ...) to own it. This is in theory valued into the asset value but really on a point in time basis. If the asset isn’t “productive” in earning income then having it on your books with those expenses just keeps eating away at funds elsewhere. Think owning a paid off rental property that doesn’t earn enough to cover its annual costs. Worth a lot in a fire sale, but terrible item to have on the books long term.
4) Companies can have negative goodwill on their balance sheet, especially if there are questions about the quality of the fundamental business or management team. Outsiders may say the company owns a lot of stuff but it’s so poorly managed that that that stuff isn’t worth what it’s normally worth. Yahoo had this issue where the market cap of the company was less than the stock Yahoo owned in other companies. “Yahoo the company” and its team was literally considered to be worth negative dollars.
Liquidity doesn't begin to explain the valuation question. SoftBank's market cap was once 110bn vs their stake in Ali Baba at 150bn [0] . Even if you marked all the Vision Fund nonsense to 0, SoftBank is still a real company that does stuff outside of being a bad PE/VC/HF firm.
I think the market was factoring in SoftBank's 160B of debt. Even if their Alibaba stake is 150b, if it's tied to the company holding 160B in debt, it's actually only offsetting a huge debt load...
I.e. I can incorporate a company, borrow 100m, and buy 100m of Alibaba. It doesn't mean my company is worth anywhere close to 100m...
>Companies can have negative goodwill on their balance sheet, especially if there are questions about the quality of the fundamental business or management team
That's not what goodwill is. Goodwill is the difference between book value and purchase price of assets to make the numbers work. It's nothing to do with the quality of the business or management team.
By this logic though shouldn’t “store brands” at the grocery store or “CVS brand” medicine at the drug store also be “illegal.” Both those surely look at which brands are selling before deciding to make a generic to put on the same shelf at a lower price. That’s not a monopoly, that’s standard practice in the retail business.
Thus the presence of competing products or the fact that generics appear against popular options is really not a good argument for nefarious activity.
The issue from some of those crying foul is really that there isn’t any brand loyalty towards what are commodity items. Why should someone buy your more expensive HDMI cable when a perfectly good one sells for less? It’s a valid question those crying foul need to answer. The answer here of course is that many/most of those doing the selling are middle-men and not actual product manufacturers thus it’s very easy to undercut the person that doesn’t really need to be part of the supply chain.
>By this logic though shouldn’t “store brands” at the grocery store or “CVS brand” medicine at the drug store also be “illegal.”
No they don't. Stores buy their stock. They can choose to stock other brands or to make their own products, but they invariably have to purchase what they sell.
The Amazon market place makes you think it's the same but it's not. Sellers are using the platform to sell their own products and they pay Amazon for that service.
Amazon is accused of using sales data from the sellers, like their sales volumes, margins and customers profiles, and then undercut them by producing their own version. Amazon basically benefit from the traffic, interest and sales data of sellers to then displace them and promote their own product.
It's like if you had a small business but your landlord had access to all your data and saw that they should also sell their own copies of your most profitable items by opening a bigger shop right next to you and selling for cheaper because being the landlord, they don't need to pay rent.
Maybe illegal, maybe not, but in any case it's cause for at least some amount of concern and deserves some overseeing.
It's way too tempting to abuse that absolute power in some way, whether as a matter or policy or just because some overzealous Amazon manager found that pushing the envelope was in their own interest.
You can't just ignore that and brush it off. We've created a potential bully and we should at least keep watch.
The B&M retail story is ... considerably more complicated. For grocery stores, "slotting fees":
“Slotting fees” (or “slotting allowances”) are fees that manufacturers pay retailers to appear on their scarce shelves. It can cost millions of dollars to launch a product in the nation’s groceries, and through that cost, these fees shape our supermarkets and diets long before we’re able to make a purchase decision ourselves.
It’s easy to think that these fees show supermarkets are “rigged” — against both consumers and smaller manufacturers that can’t afford the fees. But as the above video shows, the debate is an intense one, with strong partisans, and decent arguments, on both sides.
Importantly, those fees are only paid to launch a new product. They pay them because retailers won't buy inventory of a new product until they know it sells.
So again, not even remotely the same thing as what Amazon does.
>No they don't. Stores buy their stock. They can choose to stock other brands or to make their own products, but they invariably have to purchase what they sell.
This is incorrect. I wish people would stop repeating this in this thread. Some stores purchase their stock. But the really big players do not operate like that.
When you go into Target and go to the cracker aisle, Target has not actually purchased all of the cookies and crackers that you see on the shelf. Target effectively rents out shelf space to Nabisco, who then comes in and puts their items on the shelf (or will pay Target to take the product and put it on the shelf for them). The pricing agreement can get quite complicated and depends on the amount of shelf space, location in the store, and can also depend on number of items eventually sold... but the takeaway is that Target does not just outright buy boxes of Oreos and then try to resell them. If the Oreos don't sell (say perhaps because the customers opted to buy the Target brand sandwich cookies instead), Target isn't out any money, because they still got their shelf rental fees from Nabisco.
Going even further, Target also engages in the same type of activity Amazon does with their analytics (including sales volume, margins, customer profiles etc) and use that information to decide who gets to rent how much shelf space and where. Target et al spend incredible amounts of money optimizing this stuff, which isn't far off from what Amazon does.
People have this old rusty view of brick & mortar stores, but the reality is that they've been masters of this stuff far longer than Amazon has even been around. Amazon championed bringing these practices to the online space and became the most obvious juggernaut, but that doesn't mean these other companies are angels.
I used to have customers in both retail and on the supplier side. What you have deacribed is not at all how Target operates.
You've inverted the dependency of the relationship. People don't buy Nabisco because it's at Target; they go to Target because it has Nabisco products, hopefully for cheaper than other stores.
Thus, stores absolutely pay for every item of inventory that appears on their shelves except for some new products that might have special consignment arrangements.
Suppliers do not pay for better shelf placement. Stores determine that based on sell through and margin; the products that generate the best overall revenue get the best placement on the shelves.
Suppliers will pay for in store marketing, like displays, etc. This is usually a separate term for which no money changes hands or which offsets part of the invoice. They may also pay stores for analytics, but most stores provide that for free since it is in their interests to have better selling products.
>You've inverted the dependency of the relationship. People don't buy Nabisco because it's at Target; they go to Target because it has Nabisco products, hopefully for cheaper than other stores.
This is true for smaller stores (eg the mom-and-pop corner store or even large stores), but once retailers get to the super-large sizes, eg Target/Walmart, the relationship flips. People go to Target first and buy Nabisco because its at Target. If Nabisco wasn't there, they buy something else, but they don't stop shopping at Target.
>Thus, stores absolutely pay for every item of inventory that appears on their shelves except for some new products that might have special consignment arrangements.
>Suppliers do not pay for better shelf placement. Stores determine that based on sell through and margin; the products that generate the best overall revenue get the best placement on the shelves.
This is 100% incorrect. As I mentioned in my previous comment, some stores may operate like this, but not all. I can tell you from personal expertise in this space, but also just from a simple Google search about how retailers operate (do a search for the terms: slotting allowance, shelf-space rental, pay-to-stay, pay-to-display). See below for some links to get you started. Big retailers do not own all of the products on its shelves, and they certainly do make arrangements where manufacturers can pay extra fees to get preferential endcap placement, shelf placement, and shelf space. I have even seen agreements where a manufacturer will literally own (rather than rent) a specific shelf in an important store and can do whatever they want with it, as long as they pay recurrent fees (it reminds me of someone owning a condo in a building and paying HOA fees).
Big retailers may of course choose to not sell a certain shelf placement to a specific product because they want to reserve it for another purpose (like another competing product), but as a general rule of the thumb, if you're willing to pay enough, you can have whatever shelf spot you want.
Big retailers will also charge fees to manufacturers for the transportation and storage of the product for when the product is being stored in the retailer's warehouses or being moved by the retailer's trucks (sound familiar to what Amazon does?). The reason they can do this is because the retailer doesn't own the product, the manufacturer still does. The retailer profits by facilitating the sale of the product.
In some situations, big retailers may indeed purchase a block of products, but in every scenario I have personal experience with, the agreement was always one in which the manufacturer was obligated to buy back any product which did not successfully sell in the store, which ultimately has the same effect as just renting shelf space.
Buyback agreements don't change the fact that the ownership of goods is transferred to BigStore(tm).
BigStores do place based on profitability, that profitability may be boosted by marketing spend...
Theoretical Nabisco also cannot force a discount on their products... or even set a sale price.
I worked in procurement contracting long enough to know that despite some risk sharing(aka buybacks), the products are in full ownership of the retailer. They own the price, the discounts and the locations.
in Europe a supermarket buys the products; usually it will pay in 90/120/180 days and it has the option to return unsold items and will have advertising agreements for better/larger shelves, but everything is in the store is own by the store
Having a Nespresso concession stand that sells stuff on their own, doesn't change the fact that the retail side of the operation is inherently the owner of the products.
> No they don't. Stores buy their stock. They can choose to stock other brands or to make their own products, but they invariably have to purchase what they sell.
This is technically true, but I don't think it accomplishes what you think it does. In large retail agreements, it is fairly common to include buyback clauses. I.e. if the goods don't sell within a specified time frame, the supplier is contractually obligated to buy them back from the retailer. In some cases, they are not even required to return the inventory they have left, but the supplier must still "buy them back". In other agreements, payment isn't made until the goods are sold (which is what Amazon does).
So having to buy the goods doesn't give a brick and mortar store much extra incentive to make sure the stuff they "bought" sells. They can still undercut a product with an in-house version and suffer no losses from not selling whatever they replaced.
It's a shitty business model, but Amazon isn't alone here. If it makes sense to stop Amazon from doing it, we should stop everyone from doing it.
The stores would have to have a dominant position or abuse that position.
EU competition comission only cares about maintaining a competitive market. Until the overwhelming majority of the stores in my area are Amazon - there's no ground to target B&M stores.
If the store was a dominant market player like Walmart, then yes, there would be antitrust concerns there too, and it would be appropriate to investigate if they were abusing their market power.
Remember, this is all about antitrust (not strictly monopoly), which is abuse of a dominant market position to stifle competition. It’s possible to have a dominant position and not abuse it, and it’s possible to not have a dominant market position and be cutthroat; antitrust is concerned with neither of those cases.
And yes, it’s good for consumers right now to get cheaper stuff; the concern is that stuff might not be so cheap in the future if Amazon is allowed to gain a 99% market share in the segments which it enters.
Is a traditional store also not a marketplace for product manufacturers and distributors to sell their wares? It operates the same way. Drop off a truckload of your stuff at mega-mart’s distribution hub and they take care of the rest via their marketplace for your canned beans or whatever you’re trying to sell. If your product is popular, mega-mart will probably make mega-mart beans and put them right next to yours on the shelf at a lower price. The fact that it happens on a website vs a physical store doesn’t change anything.
It depends. By marketplace, what people mean here is that Amazon is taking zero risk on the inventory. They are merely providing a place to list it. (Along with maybe some other paid services such as fulfillment and inventory management.) Retailers sometimes operate under this model.
But retails also sometimes operate under the model where the inventory on their shelves was purchased by them from the manufacturer or distributor. They are taking the risk on the inventory, and not selling means they are losing money. The manufacturers and distributors were already paid.
So, I reflect a question back to you: If it's all your owned inventory, what does it matter what name is on the box? No matter what, you the retailer are getting your sale and making the profit. This is not true of the marketplace model. There, whitelabels are directly competing for every sale, and no sales means no money to the manufacturers of those other products.
All this is also heavily discounting the fact that Amazon also owns the search. Some people equate this to product placement on shelves, but it's really more like there's two stores. The first store is all Amazon stuff, and you have to walk through that store to get to the second store, where other sellers are.
I again suggest looking at other retail models. Grocery stores, department stores and such operate a sizable part of their business by simply providing distribution and shelf space for goods. They don’t own all the inventory on their shelf. For things like beverages and certain other goods they literally just rent shelf space in the store (3rd parties come in and stock the shelf) and then put their own store brand stuff right next to it selling for less. It’s literally the same model. One really struggles to make the argument that it’s bad to do this online but not in person. That’s the issue with this line of reasoning.
That's not at all how retailers actually operate on the US. They pay for the overwhelming majority of what they sell. Full stop.
You've taken a relatively rare thing like slotting fees and built up an entire mental model around it. That would be like saying that all programming languages are typeless because you heard that JavaScript isn't typed.
1) It's hard to hide things in a physical store. There are some tricks but if you want Brand A cereals and the store has them, you can find them in the cereal section. Amazon has in my experience, sometimes hidden product brands entirely or beyond page 4-5, favoring their own or prime products.
2) When a supermarket takes on Brand A cereal, the Brand A owner makes little risk, they get paid whether they sell or not. The supermarket is taking all the risk. If they bring their own store brand, they still run the entire risk, now for both stocks. If cereals stop selling well (because there is a milk shortage) then the supermarket is loosing a lot of money. Amazon faces no risk, they can have the vendor for Brand A continue to sell non-prime cereal from their own stock so amazon faces 0 costs if it flops. If the vendor does well they can be onboarded for inventory management and prime shipping, amazon takes more risks and more profit. Lastly, they can use methods like "We suspect the product is counterfeit, send bills for when you bought it" to gain direct access to the manufacturer of Brand A. Now they can sell Brand Amazon directly from the manufacturer, leaving the Brand owner of Brand A in the dust by selling the same product, that did well, cheaper and hiding them in the search results below their own.
The supermarket equivalent would be that the supermarket subsidizes the Brand A seller from their value-add in-store things like customer payback cards after a while, then blackmails them into giving them the manufacturer by threatening to not sell their popular product, then selling the manufacturer's product under an in-store brand and the Brand A cereal is only available under-the-counter. Brand A seller is also entirely co-dependent on the supermarket as that supermarket is 90% of the market.
I know you have wallmart in the US but in the EU we do have some variety in supermarket chains (ALDI Süd/Nord, LIDL, Edeka, Rewe, etc.).
Slotting fees are not the same model, and even if they were they're considered questionably ethical.
One difference is the branding. Grocery store products rely far more on branding, and slotting fees are often used for market research.
Stores cannot reproduce the branding, therefore their own-brand products don't have the same competitive appeal.
Amazon actually hides prominent branding. A few big brands have their own mini-stores, but most of the time you can't tell if you're getting a product from Amazon, from the original manufacturer, or from a retailer.
So when Amazon uses market analytics to decide which products to make and sell, it has a huge advantage - and it can and does wipe out existing sellers. Which is something grocery stores don't do.
Retailers most definitely take on the full risk of distribution and storage. Even when there's a buyback agreement.
Retailers are also NOT interested in buybacks, as the cost of shelf life is not cheap(much more expensive, than warehousing)... and white label products are also higher risk(not shared risk) for the retailers and are always lower margin.
There's a very clear difference between financial incentives between traditional retailers and Amazon. Equating them - is ignorance at best.
And CVS is technically also the marketplace just in physical form. I get where they're coming from, but don't really agree with the standpoint.
CVS (or really any large retail chain that sells 3rd party products and produces their own) is in a similar situation. One could, and rightfully so I think, make the argument that CVS etc should not be allowed to produce their own products, because they have significantly more insight into what is sold. Amazon noticed that several products were selling quite well and decided to get a piece of the action. Beyond showing their own products as higher ranked you'll also often see them listed under the "cheaper alternative" section on product pages.
In comparison, CVS might see that neck pillows are really popular and decides to sell their own neck pillows and put competitor ones on lower shelves. It's quite similar behavior.
Part of the reason why the EU decides to go after Amazon and not other though, I think, is because of their market share. Amazon is huge in the EU. They hold about 29% of the market. Depending on the country, even more.
Amazon also does this on a scale that other "marketplace" type companies have not. If you ever go to the Amazon website and look under Amazon basic, you'll be surprise by the amount of stuff they sell.
The difference is that CVS paid for all of the neck pillows that appear on their shelves, even the ones under their own white label.
The suppliers of the white label neck pillows provably made the other neck pillows. From their POV, they're largely indifferent because they've already been paid.
Inkjets are just not great printers, especially if you print infrequently. Laser printers used to be an expensive luxury but they’ve long since become a commodity. Get a half decent laser printer and it will work fine even if you only print once a month.
Okay, I think lasers > inkjets for most people. But its dangerous to generalize.
Inkjets consistently make higher-resolution photos than lasers at the same price point. As you approach photo-quality, you can probably get very good photos from a $500 inkjet, and commercial quality photos from a $1000 inkjet.
I don't know of any laserjet that approaches that quality. Instead, laserjets main advantage is the simpler and cheaper to use toner. At the $300 price point, laser jets are just cheaper to maintain and use over ink.
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Now there's a bunch of $100 to $200 ink printers (and laser printers) which have even worse attributes. Since most $100 printers seem to be inkjet, I think people rightfully give them a bad reputation.
But at higher price points, a 11-ink printer is the only way you're going to get anything near photo-quality. (Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000).
Agree, but I’d consider the photo quality printing to be more of an edge case for most users. If one just occasionally prints a few photos there are other inexpensive services available. But if that is the use case then yes I’d agree inkjet is better.
Unless your really need to print huge amounts of photos, most people would be better served by having their photos printed at a store or through an online service.
You could also buy print-jobs through an online service for forms and stuff, which is probably cheaper than buying a printer.
So why buy a printer at all? Well, because of the convenience factor primarily. Buying from a store (or online service) requires driving, and/or waiting for the mail to arrive.
When scrapbooking, or doing other projects with photos, its far more convenient to know that you have a printer that can instantly make a copy of any photo in your entire digital library. You don't necessarily know what photo you want yet, you may need to lay out a few pages in the scrap book before you know what you want.
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In any case, a "community printer", ie: the local library, is probably best for people who only need a few documents a year.
I think leveraging your local library resources is a skill that any adult should know how to do as well. When your documents grow beyond the ability for your local library, that's when you get your own printer.
If you’ve ever been in a company with a toxic leader you can relate. It will literally destroy everything in the company. The toxic leader usually thinks everyone else is the problem, causing them to double down. It’s a vicious cycle that’s destroyed many companies.
I've been at a company 6 years, I was thinking of leaving because I'd achived pretty much all I could in the role. In September a new CEO joined. Having listened to their plans, I was excited, new ideas, a firm direction. I decided to stay
a month later, I resigned. They were a bully who perceived any geniuine question as a challenge. Good people, coming out of meetings trying not to cry. I was coming out of meetings feeling like I was being beaten up.
My last day is next Thursday. People keep telling me how envious they are of me. I'm feeling guilt for leaving them in the lurch.
Feeling sorry for someone and feeling guilt feels the same for me. Maybe OP are mixing them up? Ie. he feels sorry for them as soon as the "we are in this together" is gone?
Guilt (fear) and feeling sorry for someone else (empathy), are two distinct feelings.
The problem is the sociopath behaviour and attitudes, that will project all their bad feelings unto others. The sociopath won't acknowledge their own state, so will blame others, also knowingly and silently for personal gain.
The remedy is radical honesty and working with oneself. Nobody else can do the work for someone, but breaking the patterns can be inspiring.
Don't let authority gain undue power over your lives. Some day you will regret it.
> If there's a board, it may be worth it to let some members know
Scenarios like this never work out well for the person doing the "complaining", whether you're going above your manager to their manager or your CEO to their board.
It's not worth your time, energy, or reputation. Focus your energy elsewhere, it's not your fight anymore.
Toxic leaders are often supported and defended by other leaders. At some point, pushing out a toxic leader is bad enough for the company image that the company would rather just hide the toxicity with NDAs. Childhood friends should never go into business together. Businesses built on a seed of nepotism are much more likely to fail. Imagine a 100-person company where the two founders are best friends since they were kids. If one of the founders repeatedly engages in inappropriate conduct, the other founder is much more likely to hide it.
This hits home. I've worked with leaders on two seperate extremes of the axes presented. In one case literally everyone of the bullet points was true. I wish I could have read this before then.
This doesn’t make sense. Domain registration is different than DNS. Many would argue keeping your domain registration separate is probably a good thing. Sounds like your problem was with the registrar (making it hard to update NS records to Route53 or anyone else) not AWS.
As someone mentioned to me recently “Success in academia is defined by publishing papers mostly read only by a few other people that define success as publishing papers. Success outside academia is defined by doing amazing $&@! that has a measurable impact on the world.”