Jurgis Posted May 16, 2021 Share Posted May 16, 2021 20 hours ago, LearningMachine said: In 2006, I was trying to decide between EBAY & AMZN for investment. At the time, I thought EBAY was the better business because it owned Paypal and also had a high-margin marketplace, where it could take a cut of transactions without any inventory or distribution expenses. I thought EBAY would benefit from competition between merchants, and will be able to extract more from transactions than Amazon could. I was clearly wrong. OT: If you think about it, EBAY could have been AMZN. They had the 3rd party platform way before AMZN. If they focused on commercial merchants and made it general shopping platform rather than auction/casual seller one, they could have Amazon'ed the Amazon. Coulda/shoulda. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pelagic Posted May 17, 2021 Share Posted May 17, 2021 16 hours ago, Jurgis said: OT: If you think about it, EBAY could have been AMZN. They had the 3rd party platform way before AMZN. If they focused on commercial merchants and made it general shopping platform rather than auction/casual seller one, they could have Amazon'ed the Amazon. Coulda/shoulda. It's funny though how Amazon and Yahoo tried to clone eBay in the early days and failed. Which ended up leading (indirectly) to Yahoo's stake in BABA and the Amazon we know today. At the time it looked like an auction style marketplace was the place to be. https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-yahoo-aim-to-topple-ebay/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted May 17, 2021 Share Posted May 17, 2021 47 minutes ago, Pelagic said: It's funny though how Amazon and Yahoo tried to clone eBay in the early days and failed. Which ended up leading (indirectly) to Yahoo's stake in BABA and the Amazon we know today. At the time it looked like an auction style marketplace was the place to be. https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-yahoo-aim-to-topple-ebay/ Yeah, funny how things go. Definitely not the "it was obvious" of the Monday morning quarterbacking that happens after the fact. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LearningMachine Posted May 17, 2021 Share Posted May 17, 2021 (edited) 22 minutes ago, Jurgis said: Yeah, funny how things go. Definitely not the "it was obvious" of the Monday morning quarterbacking that happens after the fact. A lesson I've learned is that it is really really hard to predict who is going to win. Us humans and market in general often gets the predictions wrong. I then wonder if it is better to invest such that those incorrect predictions might end up working in your favor instead of against you. Edited May 17, 2021 by LearningMachine Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted May 17, 2021 Share Posted May 17, 2021 1 hour ago, LearningMachine said: A lesson I've learned is that it is really really hard to predict who is going to win. Us humans and market in general often gets the predictions wrong. I then wonder if it is better to invest such that those incorrect predictions might end up working in your favor instead of against you. Sounds like a plan. Do you have thoughts on how to do this? (Perhaps we should move the discussion out of JD board though ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LearningMachine Posted May 18, 2021 Share Posted May 18, 2021 6 hours ago, Jurgis said: Sounds like a plan. Do you have thoughts on how to do this? (Perhaps we should move the discussion out of JD board though ) @Jurgis, here is an example of what I meant: https://thecobf.com/forum/topic/15709-ai-artificial-intelligence/?do=findComment&comment=444822. How about we start there, and if need be, then, split into a different topic? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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