Sunday, February 2, 2014

Why is Amazon so secretive?

"[S]uppose you wanted to know not about the future, but about the present or even the past. About how, for instance, Amazon’s grocery delivery service is working out in the test markets, or how many Kindles have been sold. Surely this would be the easiest thing in the world for Amazon to answer, because, you know, it’s past. Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world, but it will readily tell you how many iPhones and iPads it is selling.
But Amazon will not tell you any of this. Every quarter, the analysts get on the phone with Tom Szkutak, the chief financial officer, and pepper him with questions. But whether it is past, present or future, Mr. Szkutak ably dodges each query. Here were his replies Thursday:"
 
“I am sorry I can’t help you … you have to wait on that … In terms of the details, I can’t really give you a lot of color … you will have to stay tuned on that one … I can’t talk to the specifics of that … there is not a lot I can help you with there … I wouldn’t speculate what we would do or not do going forward … I wouldn’t speculate. We might or might not do in the future … if you look back at what we have done, you can’t expect that we might do [it] going forward … I wouldn’t want to speculate what they would or wouldn’t do related to pricing … it’s hard to tell, honestly. It’s hard to know … it’s very early … that’s really all I can say … I can’t comment.”
 
NYT All Quiet on the Amazon Front

4 comments:

chickelit said...

Nice use of gray scale font to emphasize the nebulous, Lem. Intentional?

In the beginning, Lem's Levity took some hits for inconsistent font sizes. But here you've turned it into an art form.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Lem. Intentional?

That's how the NYT had it.

YoungHegelian said...

Why does Amazon keep things so nebulous? Probably because if the market knew what was really going on they'd run for the exits. A run on the stock would totally crater Amazon, since it depends on an ever increasing stock valuation to keep up the appearances in place of actually turning a profit.

One day, Amazon will have to figure out what it wants to do for a living --- be the world's largest marketer of other people's stuff, a publisher, a provider of enterprise level cloud-based IT infrastructure, or God only knows what else by that time. It'll also have to re-structure costs so that it can build a decent profit margin into everything it does. That re-structuring will be nothing if not brutal. I doubt that Amazon as we know it today will survive.

Synova said...

On the other hand, Amazon manages to tell authors how many books they've sold and pay them their money in a timely manner... unlike traditional publishers who don't have a clue, have to wait until the next quarter, and then give you an estimate against returns and explain that they can't pay you what they owe just yet anyhow.