This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
The Amazon story is straightforward enough. An American news website reported that the company wanted to show the additional cost of import tariffs on one of its services.
A phone conversation between Bezos and Trump ensued, after which it became pretty clear Amazon had backed down, for the President said: “Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. Good guy.”
Or maybe it tells of a sense of frustration at the top of Amazon that their business is being seriously damaged by the chaos of recent weeks – its shares are down some 25 per cent from their peak in early February; if things go on like this, the company will be damaged further.
Tech still holds the power
Think about what it means here. Last month, more than 93 per cent of the searches in the UK used Google – we are their largest market outside the US itself. And 86 per cent of us use Amazon, with 70 per cent buying something at least once a month.
square HAMISH MCRAE
Newsletter (£)
Tesla's glory days are over - and it's Elon Musk's fault
Read MoreWhile most of us are not aware of it, because Nvidia’s technology is embedded in our computers, anyone who logs on is almost certainly using its products every day.
This is power. You don’t have to buy a Tesla and you can get along without Amazon if you have to, but to manage without Google would, for most people, be really difficult. Most of our computers use operating systems by either Microsoft or Apple, and virtually all our mobile phones are on Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS. In a sense, we are trapped.
You don’t need to have a quarrel. He is, after all, the second-richest person in the world, coming in at $209bn on the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind only Elon Musk, and probably with a more secure base to his fortune.
The wealthy can wait Trump out
Furthermore, Bezos is well aware that his fortune has been hit by Trump’s policies. Thanks to the decline in the share price of Amazon, he is down $29.5bn so far this year.
Money matters. That spat between Bezos and Trump – “a hostile and political act” one moment, an example of Bezos as a “good guy” the next – actually shows that wealthy America is learning how to play its mercurial new President.
Need to know
The power of Big Tech America is endlessly fascinating, because while the US as an entity dominated the world to a greater extent during the immediate post-1945 period than it does now, its technology is arguably more outstanding now than it was then.
But Microsoft and Apple changed everything, and that created a base from which the rest of the high tech giants raced forward. Europe and the UK lost ground. We used to have a choice – but now we don’t. We want and need the services that this handful of giant enterprises has created. We are hooked, and that can be most uncomfortable.
But I found I hated the new system: the home screen looked ugly, the battery drained fast, controls were in different places, and so on. Mercifully if you move within 10 days you can go back to what you had before, and restore everything in a couple of minutes. So a huge relief – but also a brutal reminder of the power that Microsoft has over all of us. It’s small comfort that there are apparently 1.4bn Windows 10 users wrestling with the same problem.
According to Wikipedia’s tally of social media platforms, the top European one is Viber, based in Cyprus, and owned by a Japanese company. I cannot find anything significant that is British-owned. Or European-owned for that matter.
None of us can resolve this problem. But we are right to be concerned.
This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The Big Tech oligarchs have one thing Trump does not: time )
Also on site :