Wow. Talk about an advertisement for the ineffectiveness of annotations. I've got comments from multiple different authors on here simultaneously - who are all these people? I was interested in Marc's annotations - talk about bait and switch.<p>For complex subjects, this is a great example of why single-author critiques are best, so you can follow a single person's train of thought and their logical conclusions (or errors).<p>This particular debate strikes me as pretty juvenile in both directions - by Krugman, and his critics. Marc gets "closest to the pin" for me when he says "if Amazon was a monopoly, it would be raising prices." Of course, that's not to say any big company can't overplay its leverage in "supplier negotiations" and this is surely something worth discussing. Marc is also right that the judgment here is a lot more nuanced than standard oil owning 60% of the market.<p>Going a little deeper on the Hachette dust-up, it's really interesting that the chattering classes never took much of an axe to Amazon's reputation until it tread on their turf - book publishing! All the waylaid mom-and-pop stores were just hicks who had it coming. Protecting the fat advances paid to big name authors - that is sacrosanct - part of the rewards that go with public life these days, and part of the corruption IMHO.<p>I will end with Glazer's beginning - "Krugman nearly always gets it right...but this is very wrong." I find that this Amazon critique is easier to contextualize if you shift that understanding - Krugman is frequently wrong about many things, and this Amazon article fits neatly with that overall trend.
I'm not sure how impressed I am by Marc's arguments. For instance:<p>> Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power.<p>This seems silly. Krugman doesn't say that Amazon's low prices are a sign that they <i>have</i> monopoly power. He's saying that Amazon uses low prices to <i>acquire or maintain</i> ("reinforce") monopoly power ("dominance").
I can't imagine that this stuff is legal - the NYT has paid Krugman to write this, and Genious is just copying the text and adding a few (to my mind inane) links and comments. It all seems very shady..
Is it just me or is the Genius interface kind of confusing? Is there any way to see just Marc Andreessen's comments and not the comments of a bunch of other randos too?
Andreessen makes some really excellent points in there, but there a few that just strike me as incorrect:<p>> Another classic Krugman rhetorical maneuver. According to Paul, keeping prices low is a sign of monopoly power, but of course he’d also say that keeping prices high would also be a sign of monopoly power.<p>Yeah its both. You can be a monopoly by having ridiculously high or low prices, mainly its really low then really high and if you think Amazon wouldnt raise everything by 100$ if it could, you're just wrong.<p>> It will startle every single business owner and CEO in the world to learn that negotiating with suppliers is now a business tactic that is “out of line”.<p>No negotiating is smart. Strong arming is wrong. Amazon is strong arming people not negotiating. They are playing the game where if you don't agree with what they are doing they are taking their toys and leaving. This causes economic harm to the company because of Amazon's volume to the point where the publishers have to use Amazon's terms which is monopolistic power.