Complicated Courting of Amazon and IBM

Coopetition, anyone? While Amazon may have won a high profile court battle against IBM regarding cloud services for the government, Amazon still supports many of IBM's platform technologies. With the increasing overlap of partners playing in each other's layer of the stack while still maintaining a partnership, one has to wonder: will companies eventually breakaway from their partners in an effort to dominate more stack layers, or will we see more collaboration among historic competitors?

Glass half-full, I would suggest the latter. According to game theory in economics, if competitors work together, they can optimize the value of the market as a whole. Even though rivals won't see as big of a slice of the pie if they crush their competitor, companies as innovative and intelligent as Amazon and IBM must realize that collaboration is mutually beneficial and grows the market regardless of the occasional heated conflict.

What do you think? Thoughts, comments, rebuttals?

Google Shopping Express

One Day, Google Will Deliver the Stuff You Want Before You Ask

Fresh off the tail of Monday's class on eBay and Amazon, Google answers "Yes" to the question, "Does eBay play in the same stack as Google?" Last Wednesday, Google announced a same-day shipping service titled, Google Shopping Express, further blurring the stack lines of the tech giants we've discussed thus far. The service is in direct competition with eBay Now (one-hour delivery service), and as you may correctly suspect, Amazon as well. Just don't expect eBay to retaliate with a self-driving car...or maybe...

Considering Eli's good point of eBay perceived as an "antique" e-shop, would you use Google for your online shopping needs given the new service? Or do they suffer from a different branding issue that also ends in a lack of e-tail sales?

Amazon: Packed in the Stack

How Jeff Bezos Made Amazon Everyone's Everything All of the Time

"There are some things that you can only do," Bezos said at one point, "Or only do really well, if you get to play in the entire stack, including all the way down to the hardware and the operating system." 

Right from the horse's mouth, Jeff Bezos mentions Amazon's strategy for the stack: domination. In the article, Bezos details Amazon's current products and service in the stack, including its new virtual tech support feature, Mayday, which has just been introduced in its recently debuted Kindle Fire HDX. And as a treat for us MS-MBA students, he shares what he views as the company's greatest opportunity in the stack (spoilers: it's software). 

This is a great precursor to our discussion about Amazon and eBay next week (sadly, I'm not on one of the Amazon teams). Considering Bezos' emphasis on the customer and a mantra of "Premium products for non-premium pricing", you can begin to see how being in all layers of the stack really pays off.