Maybe Amazon has no master plan

Maybe Amazon has no master plan

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What if America’s most successful companies are sometimes insignificant?

Recent articles on Amazon’s grocery and robotics projects in the home show that even America’s most ambitious business can wander around. In one, more details emerged about the company’s chain of supermarkets – not Whole Foods, but another one – it shows that Amazon does not yet realize how we can sell milk and chips. The company also has a team of 800 people working on what has so far looked like an Echo speaker on wheels.

Never underestimate Amazon. But we must also not assume that the successful technology giants invent it all. Sometimes these companies might just throw spaghetti against the wall.

Facebook’s efforts to turn WhatsApp into the standard method of customer interaction with businesses may be less important than the only good option of the business. When Amazon made a big splash a few years ago with promises to reintroduce U.S. healthcare, it might not have really had an idea. When Google, Facebook and SpaceX say they will bring internet access to more people using balloons, drones or satellites, they have not necessarily cracked a complicated challenge.

Many of these are worthwhile. We must all believe in the power of innovation to solve problems. But the public and policymakers should also not put too much faith in what is sometimes expensive, real-world research by giant corporations.

Let me go back to one of Amazon’s high profile grocery projects. To sum up the last 15 years of the company: Amazon has been running a grocery delivery service for a decade without much success. Then, almost four years ago, he bought the Whole Foods chain of 500 grocery stores for more than $ 13 billion. It was not a crush yet. Now Amazon is building a else chain from the front with stores that Bloomberg News described as somewhere between a Trader Joe’s and larger supermarkets.

The optimistic view of Amazon’s convoluted groceries is that this is only the first step in the company’s master plan. Can be!

There are news reports that Amazon has dreams about strong automated stores and plans to eliminate cash registers in many places. Maybe Amazon wants to use its grocery outposts as preparation centers for delivering fresh fish and dish soap.

I’m eager to see Amazon’s great ideas. But for 15 years, there has been no evidence of Amazon’s great theory on groceries or the ability to translate imagination into reality. Meanwhile, some businesses in China mix the best of in-store shopping cleverly with delivery. Britain’s Ocado and Market Kurly in South Korea are tackling inefficiency in getting groceries through people’s doors. The best ideas in groceries do not come from Amazon.

This is where I add that it is possible that I would look like an idiot to write this. Groceries, home robots, pharmaceuticals and health insurance are all areas that are innovating. It’s just helpful to think of Amazon’s efforts as experiments – sometimes bad things – rather than full-blown creation wonders.

Mostly I’m worried that we’ll have too much confidence in the low input that tampers for tech giants, but high problems for the rest of us. It is not helpful if some policymakers stop carry-through projects to see if driverless cars are the answer to nightmares. (They will not.)

I write a lot about the power of big technology companies and the damage that can result. But belief in technological superpowers can be all damaging.

Do you know what is not wonderful? Australians get stuck amid a business deal between Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

Do you remember a month ago – I know, it feels like time has no meaning these days – when Facebook blocked all news from the app in Australia? This comes after a new law in the country required Google and Facebook to pay news organizations for links to their articles.

The law can be deceived or it can be clever. I do not know. Google and Facebook certainly did not like it – but at least they followed opposite approaches at first.

Google has chosen to grit its teeth and sign contracts to pay for several news organizations, including News Corp, which is owned by Murdoch. Facebook’s response was to make a fuss, criticize the law and prevent people and news organizations from sharing or viewing news links on its app in Australia. (Facebook later temporarily lifted the temporary eclipse.)

Then on Monday, Facebook almost did what Google did a month ago: it signed an agreement to pay for material from Murdoch’s company. Maybe this fight that was supposedly over the good of the public was really just a quarrel between billionaires?

I do not want to allow the rather meh conclusion to obscure the important underlying issues. Google and Facebook consume a significant portion of the ads sold worldwide. It makes life more difficult for news organizations and other businesses that support themselves with advertising.

Many people and government officials are trying to figure out what, if anything, needs to be done about this. U.S. lawmakers are discussing a bill that would give smaller news organizations joint bargaining power to cut transactions with Facebook and Google – no different from what happened in Australia. (It is also no different from a proposal I wrote about in 2009.)

Whether these are smart steps and whether news organizations deserve special help at all is a worthy debate. Unfortunately, the important questions in Australia have been confused by rich companies fighting over power and money.

  • A secret labor settlement, again relevant: After a controversial effort to unite Amazon warehouse workers in east-central Virginia, the company has issued a 22-point promise that they will not retaliate against supporting a union in the future. My colleague David Streitfeld tells that previously secret agreement with federal regulators and how it is relevant to the current labor unrest of the company.

  • To hack all your text messages for $ 16: A Vice News reporter hired several hackers who could redirect all his text messages and use the access to hack into his online accounts. This is a narrow story that shows a lack of accountability in the vast mess of our SMS system.

  • Streaming helped to change the sound of music: In the Times Opinion section, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding explain how the pop music structure of verse and refrain has begun to change due to several factors, including the desire to make songs that appeal to people on Spotify or TikTok.

Comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish found out she won a Grammy Award while recording a children’s TV show. Watch as she and the children are very happy through this news.

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