A marketplace maker can't have its own shop,
a marketplace maker can't have its own delivery service,
a marketplace maker can't have its own payment processor.
To me the biggest problem with these kinds of platform is information asymmetry. Amazon literally knows about every credit card number and every shipment and every product ever sold, while the customer can't even trust if the numbers on a seller's page are legit or just the result of scams, or if the price didn't change 5 seconds before they clicked on the product page.
The only stategy to rebalance the market is to REQUIRE every company to be as CLUELESS as possible about what happens on their platform, so basically enforce PRIVACY.
Amazon should only know which sellers are on the platform and their catalog of products. It shouldn't know my address or my purchase history.
The sellers should only know which of their products are selling. They shouldn't know my address.
The shipment company should only know my address and what the package broadly is about. It shouldn't know exactly what I have bought or that the purchase was done through Amazon.
All of this could be achieved with a well made public key cryptography architecture and open APIs for being a customer, seller, payment processor and shipment company.
Let's take an example: a seller wants to sell on Amazon.
1 - they create a key pair
2 - they tell Amazon their public key
3 - when I click on the seller's page I receive the public key and now the traffic is encrypted between us, Amazon can see nothing
4 - the seller has chosen the shipment company(s) and payment processor(s) and gives me their public key at the moment of purchase
5 - the customer encrypts the credit card info with the payment processor pubkey, encrypts the shipping info with the shipping company's pubkey and encrypts everything with the seller's pubkey
6 - the seller now delivers the information to the payment processor and shipment company
7 - the shipment company tells the seller how much the package is going to cost and the payment processor tells the seller if the payment has been concluded successfully
8 - the seller prints the tracking paper's encrypted QR code and the shipment company proceeds to deliver it to the customer
So what would be Amazon's role in all of this?
They should provide a website and/or app that just works across all platforms imaginable and is fast and stable and good looking.
They should manage the identities of sellers so customers know they are buying from real people, but nothing more.
Lastly they should collect a fee for every transaction.
E-commerce should be reliable and automated, not a privacy horror fest filled with ads, bogous suggestions and shady practices and policies
Even more important than lighting is the ability to manually control the settings of your camera. The photographer mentioned in the post is clearly using a third party camera app (that I too use) which allows to change the shutter speed, ISO and has manual focus capabilities.
Would he have gotten the same image if he had had to rely on the automatic settings? No, because then he would have had to change the lights to appease an ever changing and inscrutable iPhone exposure compensation algorithm.
I think we are accustomed to bad smartphone photography not because of the technical specification of the sensors and lenses, but because people simply don't have the time, the will, or even the physical ability of manually shooting the with good pondered settings. In the analog world the same holds true for those cheap single use cameras our parents gave us when going to camp; unless you were lucky all the photos taken would have looked bland and flat, exactly like a quick iPhone snapshot
I am very fed up with standards lacking a free and open reference implementation. It's very easy to produce a specification for embedding 3D models into a browser, but who is going to follow up with and actual complying browser?
The big guys, that's who.
Google, Microsoft, Apple can just throw piles and piles of money at the problem; but what about everyone else? What about Firefox? What about Palemoon? What about Falkon?
When the AV1 codec came about one of the first thing provided was the reference implementation (AOMenc), same with Wayland. Not the most performant, not the lightest on resources, but at least it followed the protocol.
W3C and alike though don't seem to like this perspective. Why can't we have an average performing BSD-licensed W3C-compliant web browser? Just as a last resort if you just want to use something that is sure to work, or maybe the first browser you can port to a new architecture or OS to get things going.
yes and no.
first of all: which services does Amazon provide that would make an app dependent on them in the same way it might be on Google services? does Amazon have its own system for push notifications? for weather data? for syncing contacts?
secondly: it has been confirmed that Android apps will be able to be sideloaded. a Microsoft employee tweeted about it but I can't really find the post right now
To me the biggest problem with these kinds of platform is information asymmetry. Amazon literally knows about every credit card number and every shipment and every product ever sold, while the customer can't even trust if the numbers on a seller's page are legit or just the result of scams, or if the price didn't change 5 seconds before they clicked on the product page. The only stategy to rebalance the market is to REQUIRE every company to be as CLUELESS as possible about what happens on their platform, so basically enforce PRIVACY.
Amazon should only know which sellers are on the platform and their catalog of products. It shouldn't know my address or my purchase history. The sellers should only know which of their products are selling. They shouldn't know my address. The shipment company should only know my address and what the package broadly is about. It shouldn't know exactly what I have bought or that the purchase was done through Amazon.
All of this could be achieved with a well made public key cryptography architecture and open APIs for being a customer, seller, payment processor and shipment company. Let's take an example: a seller wants to sell on Amazon. 1 - they create a key pair 2 - they tell Amazon their public key 3 - when I click on the seller's page I receive the public key and now the traffic is encrypted between us, Amazon can see nothing 4 - the seller has chosen the shipment company(s) and payment processor(s) and gives me their public key at the moment of purchase 5 - the customer encrypts the credit card info with the payment processor pubkey, encrypts the shipping info with the shipping company's pubkey and encrypts everything with the seller's pubkey 6 - the seller now delivers the information to the payment processor and shipment company 7 - the shipment company tells the seller how much the package is going to cost and the payment processor tells the seller if the payment has been concluded successfully 8 - the seller prints the tracking paper's encrypted QR code and the shipment company proceeds to deliver it to the customer
So what would be Amazon's role in all of this? They should provide a website and/or app that just works across all platforms imaginable and is fast and stable and good looking. They should manage the identities of sellers so customers know they are buying from real people, but nothing more. Lastly they should collect a fee for every transaction. E-commerce should be reliable and automated, not a privacy horror fest filled with ads, bogous suggestions and shady practices and policies