英文部分及图片来自“经济学人”杂志。译文是个人学习、欣赏语言之用，谢绝转载或用于任何商业用途。本人同意简书平台在接获有关著作权人的通知后，删除文章。
2017.03.30日亚马逊老大贝索斯身家超过巴菲特成为全球第二的消息登上各大媒体头条。成为这篇翻译完成时的大背景。有一种身处潮头的感觉。有幸，有幸。
For many retailers Amazon is both a competitor and a way of getting more business. There are more than 70,000 companies, Amazon says, that earn more than $100,000 a year selling through the firm’s site. Many of them are competing with their host in one way or another. Some go up against the company’s own private-label products, which range rather bafflingly from potato crisps to baby wipes to loafers. Many more go up against the stock that Amazon buys and resells.
对众多零售商而言，亚马逊既是竞争对手，也是获取更多业务的渠道。亚马逊宣称，每年有7万多家公司通过其网站实现销售超过10万美元。其中许多公司或多或少与他们的“宿主”有竞争关系。比如要和亚马逊公司的自主品牌产品进行角逐。亚马逊公司经营的产品范围之广令人困惑，从炸薯片，湿纸巾到平底便鞋。更多的则要和亚马逊购买和转售的库存相抗衡。
For anyone selling on Amazon, prominent placement in the “buy box” that appears on screen when something is searched for is a big boost. According to One Click Retail, a consultancy, products in the buy box account for 86% of sales on the website and 93% on the mobile app. By reverse-engineering the algorithm that runs the box, the consultants found that if a seller pays Amazon to handle warehousing and logistics on its behalf, which probably speeds up shipping, it is more likely to win a spot in the box. So on the occasions when Amazon’s retail offering loses the buy box,it still gets a piece of the action.
对那些在亚马逊上做销售的人来说，当客户搜索商品时，能显示在屏幕上的“黄金购物车”显著位置对业务会有极大的推动。据咨询机构One Click Retail透露，“黄金购物车”中的产品占网站销售额的86％，在移动应用程序上则达到了93％。运用逆向工程对“黄金购物车”的算法进行分析后，顾问们发现，如果卖方付费让亚马逊代为处理仓储和物流，这不但可能加快运输速度，更有可能在“黄金购物车”中赢得一席之地。所以即便亚马逊的零售商品无法赢得“黄金购物车”，它仍然可以从中分得一杯羹。
All good things...
一切美好的事物...
Bigger competitors do not want to work through Amazon. Some will not use AWS because they don’t want to subsidise a rival. Large retailers are seeking to match Amazon’s standard of fast, cheap shipping on their own. But that lowers them margins for their online sales and risks cannibalising sales from their stores. The competition thus threatens to make many of them permanently less profitable.
大一些的竞争对手则不愿通过亚马逊开展业务。由于不想补贴对手，有些公司不会选用AWS。大型零售商们正在想方设法让自己可与亚马逊快捷，便宜的投递标准相匹敌。但是，这会让他们在线销售的毛利降低，同时还冒着和线下商店自相残杀的风险。于是，这场竞争对许多生意构成了威胁，使之不再像以前那样有利可图。
Last year Walmart made a particularly expensive bid to fend off Amazon, paying $3bn for Jet.com, an e-commerce startup. Marc Lore, Jet.com’s boss, has history when it comes to competing with Amazon.“The Everything Store”, a book about Amazon by Brad Stone, a journalist, tells the story of Quidsi, a previous startup of Mr Lore’s that sold nappies through a site called Diapers.com. When Amazon was building a nappies business, the bigger company cut prices so rapidly that Quidsi reckoned that matching them would lose it $100m in three months. Quidsi agreed to be bought in 2010.
去年，沃尔玛斥巨资击退亚马逊，为收购电商创业公司Jet.com支付了30亿美元。Jet.com的老板马克罗尔（Marc Lore）与亚马逊的竞争有一段历史。“The Everything Store”是记者Brad Stone所著的一本关于亚马逊的书。其中讲述了Quidsi的一则故事。它Quidsi是罗尔以前的创业公司，主要通过一家名为Diapers.com的网站出售尿布。当亚马逊创立尿布业务时，大公司降价速度如此之快，以至于Quidsi相信，接受相同的价格将在三个月内损失1亿美元。 因此Quidsi在2010年同意出售。
Marc Loreis an entrepreneur and co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and chairman ofJet.com, an e-commerce startup launched in 2014. Prior to Jet, Marc co-founded Quidsi, the parent company of a family of websites such asDiapers.comand Soap.com, with childhood friend Vinit Bharara. The Quidsi company was sold in 2011 to Amazon for $545 million.
Other competitors are worried, too. In December Amazon challenged Netflix by expanding Prime Video to more than 200 countries. “I feel like we’re competing with an unusual person,” Reed Hastings, Netflix’s boss, has admitted. “Because Jeff’s there, it’s kind of scary.” This is not a winner-takes-all contest; two-thirds of American Prime subscribers also subscribe to Netflix, according to Cowen, a financial services firm. But as Prime Video’s offering improves, some Netflix viewers might drop their subscription.
其他竞争对手也颇为担心。亚马逊在十二月份通过将Prime Video扩展到200多个国家来挑战Netflix。 Netflix的老板Reed Hastings承认：“我觉得我们正在和一个不寻常的人对抗。 因为杰夫来了，这有点吓人”。这不是赢者通吃的比赛;根据金融服务公司Cowen的说法，美国三分之二的Prime会员同时也订阅了Netflix。然而，随着Prime Video产品的提升，一些Netflix的会员可能会放弃订阅。
Netflix hopes to keep them by spending on its exclusive shows; like Spotify in music,it also has the advantage of an established brand and a customer base. But competition is hotting up. Disney, Fox,NBC Universal and Time Warner have beefed up a streaming competitor of their own,Hulu.
Netflix希望通过投资独家电视剧来留住订阅会员; 和Spotify在音乐中的地位一样，它也拥有成熟的品牌和客户群的优势。但竞争正日趋白热化。迪士尼，福克斯，NBC环球和时代华纳已经推出了他们自己的流媒体（Hulu）加入战团。
Hulu(stylized ashulu) is an Americansubscription video on demandservice owned by Hulu LLC, a joint venture withThe Walt Disney Company(throughDisney–ABC Television Group) (30%),[8]21st Century Fox(throughFox Entertainment Group) (30%),Comcast(throughNBCUniversal) (30%), and as of August 10, 2016,Time Warner(throughTurner Broadcasting System) (10%, minority stake).
The other tech giants have their own reasons to be worried about Amazon—though they may also have the best defences. Apple faces the risk that Amazon,not iTunes, becomes the default platform for streaming and buying content; but it has the diversified revenue needed to fight its corner. Google, for its part, does not want shopping through Amazon, and particularly Alexa, to cut it out of the loop,jeopardising its advertising revenues; nor does it want Alexa to be the platform people chose for running their homes. In February Google said its new assistant—called,simply, Assistant—would not only power a device called Google Home, but roll out to smartphones using Android, its mobile operating system. Their strength in mobile phones gives both Apple and Google an edge over Amazon.
其他科技巨头们有各自担心亚马逊的理由 - 尽管他们可能也有最好的防御手段。苹果公司面临着亚马逊取代iTunes成为流媒体和内容购买默认平台的风险; 但它具有多样化的收入手段捍卫自己的地位。就其本身而言，谷歌公司不愿通过亚马逊购物，尤其是Alexa，这将令其出局，最终危及其广告收入; 它也不希望Alexa成为人们用来管理家庭的平台。Google在二月份表示，其新助理功能 - 简称“助理” - 不但将驱动名为Google Home的装置，还将推广到使用Android移动操作系统的智能手机上。在手机方面的优势使得苹果和谷歌相比亚马逊都处于领先地位。
Tech giants will also be fighting Amazon in the cloud. Microsoft is its strongest competitor, but Google and IBM are formidable,too. All four are fighting to lower prices and provide better technology, with billions now being pumped into AI.
科技巨头们也将与亚马逊云端斗法。微软是其中最强的对手，但Google和IBM的实力也不容小觑。这四家公司缠斗在了一起，主旨是降低价格和提供更好的技术。他们还投资了数十亿美元于人工智能。
If competitors fail to halt Amazon’s whirl of activities, antitrust enforcers might yet do so instead. This does not seem an imminent threat. American antitrust authorities mainly consider a company’s effect on consumers and pricing, not broader market power. By that standard, Amazon has brought big benefits.
如果竞争对手未能阻挡亚马逊的进击旋风，反垄断执法者却可能做到这一点。这个威胁似乎还不至于迫在眉睫。美国反垄断机构主要考虑公司对消费者的影响力和对定价的影响，而不是更广泛的市场力量。以这个标准衡量，亚马逊带来得更多是好处。
Two perils lurk, however. One, for now, is theoretical. In a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, Lina Kahn argued that,among other things, the scope of Amazon’s activities may make it impossible for competitors not to end up relying on it. If regulators paid more heed to market power, that could be a red flag—especially as Amazon continues to grow and provide its services to competitors ever more widely.A second threat is real. Donald Trump does not care for the Washington Post, a newspaper Mr Bezos owns. In 2016 Mr Trump said Mr Bezos was using the Post to attack him because Amazon has “a huge antitrust problem”.If Mr Trump believes that—or even if he doesn’t—his administration might favour action.
然而，有两个潜伏的危险不得不防。到现在为止，一个是理论上的。耶鲁法律杂志最近发表了一篇文章中，莉娜·卡恩（Lina Kahn）论证说，亚马逊的业务范围可能使对手最终不能不依赖于它。如果监管机构更加关注市场力量，那可能成为一个大问题，特别是亚马逊继续这样发展下去，为竞争对手提供更广泛的服务。第二个威胁则是真实的。唐纳德·特朗普不在乎“华盛顿邮报”。这是贝佐斯拥有的一家报业集团。特朗普在2016年表示，贝佐斯在使用邮报攻击他，而且亚马逊有严重的反垄断问题。如果特朗普认为如此，即便他不认为如此 - 他的政府都可能会采取行动。
For now, though, Amazon’s rivals must fend for themselves. They can hope Mr Bezos makes a mistake, or gets wrong-footed by some startling new trend—but though both are possible, they are hardly a strategy. Instead, the best defence is simple: sell something that customers want and Amazon does not have. Exceptional merchandise and service helps. In America big, bland bookstores are struggling, but the number of independent booksellers has climbed. The threat from Amazon has forced Walmart to improve its stores, with easier checkout and more helpful staff; it has seen a bump in sales. Amazon’s investments in television have helped fuel a bidding war for good programming—Hollywood’s studios are producing the best television for generations. And thanks to AWS, and its competitors, there has never been a better time to start up a web-based or data-centric firm.
不过，亚马逊的对手们眼下必须为自己奋力一搏。他们可以寄希望贝佐斯犯错，或者没能抓住一些令人吃惊的新趋势。两者都有可能，但这些算不上是策略。相反，最好的防御是简单有效的：销售客户想要而亚马逊没能提供的商品或服务。卓越的商品和服务大有裨益。在美国，令人乏味的大型书店正在勉力挣扎，但独立书商的数量却在攀升。亚马逊的威胁迫使沃尔玛改善店面，结帐更便捷和更有帮助的员工;这些改善带来了销售突破。亚马逊对电视内容的投资催燃了对优质节目制作的热捧 - 好莱坞的工作室正在为几代人创造最好的电视节目。感谢AWS及其对手，对于想要开创一家基于网络或以数据为中心的公司来说，现在是前所未有的好机会。
For decades, consumer giants mostly grew slowly and comfortably, with only occasional bursts of innovation. Now Amazon’s epic journey is forcing companies to lower prices and to improve products or to suffer. Many may, as a result, become less profitable; many will instead improve. And all the while, as Mr Wilke puts it, Amazon’s “pioneers wander the world with divine discontent and say, ‘how can I make that better today?’” Companies on its ever larger roster of rivals settle for mediocrity at their peril.
几十年来，消费巨头们大多成长缓慢，贪图安逸，鲜有创新突破。现在亚马逊史诗般的征程正在迫使这些公司要么降价，改善产品；要么忍受痛苦和损失。最终，一部分公司可能会变得不那么有利可图; 另一部分则会改变。一直以来，正如Wilke所说，亚马逊的“先行者们怀抱与生俱来的永不满足的精神徘徊于天地之间，不断追问自己：”今天我该做些什么让世界变得更加美好？”。在它越来越长的对手清单中的那些公司有归于平庸的危险。
