Linked List: August 6, 2013

Tuesday, 6 August 2013

MG Siegler on Jeff Bezos’s Strategy With Amazon 

MG Siegler:

The goal is actually to not make a huge profit too early, and Bezos manages it perfectly. You want to avoid showing your cards too early as you continue to lay the groundwork for an ever-larger business. Occasionally, you’ll have to show those cards and win a hand to prove that you can. But the rest of the time you call and fold, as you await the monster to take the entire pot.

Great piece. I’ve harped on Amazon’s seemingly eternal lack of profitability as much as anyone, but when you think about it and study their business, it’s not that they can’t turn a profit. They’re not burning through money like they were in the go-go ’90s. They simply choose not to turn a profit, and instead invest everything in operations and low prices.

The key to Bezos’s genius, though, is in how he’s set the expectations from Amazon’s investors. They’re seemingly all on board with this strategy, and, in return, this permission to run at break-even has made Amazon impossible for need-to-turn-a-profit businesses to compete with. That’s what makes Amazon “the anti-Apple”, as MG writes. Apple is a formidable competitor because it’s so massively profitable; Amazon is a formidable competitor because it has permission — even encouragement — from its investors to run the operation at break-even.

Update: My succinct theory: Bezos’s plan is to forever keep profits just on the horizon, like a will-o’-the-wisp.

McDonald’s Suggested Budget for Employees Shows Just How Impossible It Is to Get by on Minimum Wage 

Robyn Pennacchia, writing at Death and Taxes:

And what do you get for working 74 hours a week? Well, you don’t get heat, clearly. There’s a big ol’ zero next to the heat in that chart. In my building– we have separate checks for gas and electric– that would mean that not only do you not get to heat and cool your home, but also that you do not get to heat your water, or cook on your stove, if you have a gas stove (I do).

Also noticeably absent in this budget? Food. And gas. There’s a line for a car payment, but not for gas. Which is suspect, because if you’re working two jobs it’s possible you will pay more for your gas than you’d be paying for your car. Also… health insurance for $20 a month? […]

There are people who comfort themselves by telling themselves that poor people are only poor because poor people are lazy. Pretty sure someone who works 74 hours a week isn’t lazy.

(Via Sarah Pavis, who is guest posting for Kottke this week, and killing it.)

Famous Guns 

Nice collection by Federico Mauro. (If I could add just one, it’d be Boba Fett’s.)

Developer Support for iOS 7 

Craig Hockenberry conducted a little survey:

An overwhelming number of developers are updating apps for iOS 7. Of 575 valid responses, 545 developers indicated that they were working on an update for iOS 7. That’s an adoption rate of 95%!

52 percent of those are going iOS 7-only. I’m not surprised; the changes are so deep, it’d be hard to support both 6 and 7 with a cohesive UI. And there’s so much good stuff — like Text Kit — that is only going to be available in 7.