Sainsbury's aims to "future-proof" its business with the £1.3bn offer to buy Argos owner Home Retail Group.

16:40 - how to consume amazon offerings!? via their platform, silo. closed. drm. // distribution model - for prime - lock-in - convenience - less friction. // "Kids don't care much about quality." // taking share of media consumption. // compelling offering - music, series, streaming, e-commerce, gaming, ... // it's not about entry point to access, lowering the price point of entry for the consumption device and the subscription of amazon prime in aggregate - and lock the consumer in. the aggressive price is an attack strategy (opening up/diversifying the price point) of the distribution model to grow the prime business. //

Only two start-ups have properly challenged Amazon over the past decade: Zappos and Diapers. [...] Having spent time with Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, the leadership duo who built Zappos, and Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, the founders of Diapers, I can tell you: these are intense competitors who recognized the best outcome was to join forces with the industry leader. So if Amazon is the low cost winner of selling brands online, if they are acquiring their best competitors, and if their everyday low prices are available to the entire country via a mechanical turk algorithm which is guaranteed to beat you, how do you compete? [...] [ eBay pure p2p marketplace ] [...] This next generation of e-commerce companies is as much about what you exclude as what you include. // &! only up for grabs (Amazon model) is in the developing world & emerging market - for entrepreneurs - & only possible double digit returns for investors. and the battle has already begun ... since like 05/09 China/India ...

employee churn rate at the Four Horsemen high //

n Thiel’s phrasing: “Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.” Thiel makes an important point: The Internet-age monopolies are a different species; they flummox our conventional ways of thinking about corporate concentration and have proved especially elusive to those who ponder questions of antitrust, the discipline of law that aims to curb threats to the competitive marketplace. Part of the issue is the laws themselves, which were conceived to manage an industrial economy—and have, over time, evolved to focus on a specific set of narrow questions that have little to do with the core problem at hand. [... amazon seems to do nothing illegal ...] [...] Unchallenged monopolists have little incentive to disrupt industries they already control.

Comparing Nuts with Apples with Bananas ...
not good.

A landmark Supreme Court ruling Monday rejected a class-action gender bias lawsuit against retail giant Wal-Mart. Jeffrey Brown talks to two legal experts about the wider impact on class-action claims.

The idea is that Walmart -- which is selling many of these devices, such as TVs and Blu-ray players, to consumers -- could keep its movie revenue intact as DVD sales and rentals gradually shift to digital. As a reader points out, Walmart already has good relationships with studios, which could potentially help it strike better streaming deals than its rivals.

The problem is that it's just going to take way too long for Walmart and Vudu to make a major impact here on their own, and as a result, this deal will likely be a failure.