The novel strategy of making money, and investing to do so - Amazon + Whole Foods

Episode 97 · June 29th, 2017 · 1 hr 3 mins

About this Episode

Looks like we’ll be getting cheaper organic food what with Amazon buying Whole Foods. What exactly is the strategy at play here, though? Other than the obvious thing of doing online groceries, how is Amazon advantaged here such that others (like Wal-mart), can’t simply do this themselves. We go over these questions and how they related to M&A in general. Plus recommendations and some podcast meta talk.

Mid-roll

Podcast meta-talk

Amazon Buys Whole Foods

  • This was not covered in the Mary Meeker slide-fest.
  • Coté’s notebook on the topic.
  • Stratechery on WF Acquisition
  • Exponent Podcast
  • What exactly are the barriers to entry here for other grocery stores.
  • The business: online, and just the grocery store on it’s own...plus the 460+ physical stores for other goods?
  • Barriers to entry, Amazon buyers (Whole Foods looks good now?), culture clash?, HEB love, private label

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IAAS is Here!

How Microsoft Is Shifting Focus to Open Source

  • Link
  • “Chef is used to manage thousands of nodes internally across Azure, Office 365 and Bing.”

Amazon Eyeing Slack?

  • Link
  • “Buying Slack would help Seattle-based Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it seeks to compete with rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

Walmart Buys Bonobo

Walmart Sez Get Off the AWS

What’s Wrong with Jenkins?

  • Jenkins is the Nagios of CI/CD
  • “No toolchain is perfect, but you can achieve software delivery perfection (or something close to it, at least) when you implement the right culture.” Tools don’t substitute culture.

Oracle’s Swinging For the Fences (and missing)

  • Link
  • “He was also unwilling for Specsavers to become a guinea pig for Oracle's cloud.”

Ubuntu Mobile Post Mortem

Serverless and the Death of DevOps

  • Link
  • Spoiler: “DevOps is the ultimate reactive, or event-driven, tech use case. It’s not going anywhere”

State of DevOps 2017 Report

Commercial Open Source Software Companies

  • Link
  • A bit of sourcing on the numbers would be valuable
  • Glad Chef’s not on the list, wouldn’t want to comment on the numbers

Cloud Foundry Summit

Heptio Out of Stealth Mode with K8s Management Tool

  • TheNewStack covere
  • Official page
  • File under “It didn’t already do that. I see.”
  • Not sure this qualifies as “coming out of stealth”, everyone knows they work on open source K8s. I’m not seeing a monetization strategy yet beyond support & training. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they raised $8.5 for their A-round

BMC Software Exploring Merging with CA

  • STOP THE PRESSES! TERRIBLE MEETS TERRIBLE?
  • So far, no confirmation, but:
  • “While the two companies were once dominant in the systems management industry, the analyst notes that CA and BMC have 7.5% and 8% share respectively as of FY16 which combined would put them on a near even footing with IBM, the largest vendor, at 15%.”
  • “There are also many other vendors in the market including MSFT (7%) and NOW (5%) so anti trust concerns should not be an issue.”

High Level Kubernetes Overview

  • Link
  • “Basically Kubernetes is a distributed system that runs programs (well, containers) on computers. You tell it what to run, and it schedules it onto your machines.”

More on Service Meshes

Recommendations