Brian Dumaine

Bezonomics is a detailed look at the history of Amazon and where it may be looking to expand to in the future (although it’s more of speculation, as the company is famously secretive about where it will expand next). I thought from the title that this would be more about the economics of Amazon’s stock management, pricing and famous algorithm but it’s not. Sure, they are covered but it’s not incredibly in depth.
The book starts with the history of Amazon and then looks at how it managed to create disruption in multiple markets, from books to general online selling. A lot is made of collecting customer data to determine what you like and offering tailored recommendations. (I would say that having experienced those, sometimes they are way off the mark. Amazon, you can only have so many notebooks!) Product placement on the search pages and the ability of Amazon to use that data to make their own products also has a lot of page time, bringing up the question of whether Amazon destroys small business. There are cases for and against this, but it tends to be on the side that Amazon Marketplace is creating more opportunities for small businesses. Generally, the book takes on a supportive tone of Amazon.
The book also covers the future for Amazon, considering that they may expand into the healthcare market in the US. (This book was written before the pandemic, so I don’t know whether this is still a thing). It’s an interesting idea, particularly as the healthcare system in the US is so different to other countries – more of a free but still flawed market. It all depends if Amazon’s ‘AI flywheel’ (the constant refrain in this book) can keep spinning against a highly restricted and legislated market where the stakes are a lot higher in terms of money and patient care.
While I enjoyed the book overall, I did have to stop several times to shake my head at the differences between the Amazon US market and other countries. For example, I have Amazon Prime and ordered a book that is in stock, across the other side of the country. Shipping is free as expected, but it’s not overnight or 2-day delivery as in the US – it’s 5 weeks. And that’s not unusual – one of my Black Friday orders (a video game) took 4 weeks to travel 2500 miles. There seems to be some disparity in the services offered between countries – maybe it’s just who Amazon chooses to partner with for deliveries, maybe it’s that I’m in a relatively small market. The book is well written, and if you’re not aware of Amazon’s various expansions and rare failures, you will enjoy the insight into this huge company.… (mais)

The dudebro book of 2020. Some of the writing seemed amateurish and awkward, but it’s nothing a glib narrator can’t handle, because let’s face it: this is a book for businessmen to listen to while traveling. Excessive and tiresome repetition of the phrase “AI-driven flywheel” plagues the narrative.

I wasn’t sure at first what the book was trying to be. A guide to getting rich like Bezos/competing with Amazon? An exposé? “Bezonomics” is a basic guide to what Amazon is up to (a lot); a report of what customers, third-party sellers, employees, business rivals, and politicians say about Amazon; and a treatise on Dumaine’s confidence that Amazon will just keep “disrupting” stuff until they take over every retail sector—but didn’t we think that same thing about Walmart in the ‘90s?

Come on. Amazon is going to keep “spinning its flywheel” faster and faster until I’m banking with Amazon, asking Alexa to connect me with my doctor, and trusting Alexa and various robots to send me edible bananas? I think the very idea is bananas. Also, I have been ordering books from Amazon for 20 years, and its omniscient AI is trying to sell me books on John Adams today, because I bought my son textbooks related to politics seven years ago.

The Internet of Things might turn out to be a passing fad, when people come to regret paying $50 for a light bulb and decide they don’t have the financial resources for a deluge of internet-connected “smart” stuff. The larger fad in society is to disconnect, to limit screen time, and to engage in unplugged experiences with people and in nature.

I enjoyed the parts about businesses that are thriving by creating a special customer experience online and in-store that Amazon can’t match, to which Dumaine should have devoted more pages. Maybe the part about Bezos being a space lunatic could have been edited out to make room for more examples of other outlier business success. Trader Joe’s has nothing to fear from Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition despite knowing nothing about customers except what they buy. Why and how?

The subtitle led me to expect more specifics about business strategies. How are the world’s best companies learning anything from Bezonomics? Unless by “best” Dumaine means the biggest companies, such as Walmart, I didn’t glean many specifics. Pour billions into sophisticated algorithms and hope they work? Perhaps all of the algorithms that work best are the ones that are more than a decade old (make suggestions related to past purchases) and Amazon, Walmart and other behemoths should quit wasting their money and focus on customer service, quality product curation, and nicer design. My favorite online retailer, Sephora, is mentioned in the book, and they offer a special shipping plan to their Insiders. If Sephora were a wreck like Amazon, I, an Insider, would not have bothered with it.

Dumaine gives ample and fair coverage to privacy and sociopolitical concerns, and even talks about the ecological impacts of mammoth online retailers running giant server farms. Dumaine asks whether Amazon should be broken up, as two Democratic Presidential candidates have called for, and intelligently covers both sides of the debate. The book would have been incomplete without this discussion.

I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley and was encouraged to submit an honest review.… (mais)