amazon bezos alibaba jack ma

while amazon and alibaba have emerged since 1995 as the 2 largest shopping networks ever built, their founders had very different goals and very different building sequences - apart from the fact thyat jeff had to build everything facing urgent competition while jack ma had about 10 years to rehearse concepts and find partners - what are the top 10 differences -and which if either would make your peoles happier and more sustainably productive

1 for much of fist 10 years bezos had to make every next big bet by himself or with small team he trusted- financiers said his model was abnormal; academics said bricks would demolish clicks; there wasnt much room for asking what will happen to america's cities if over time most malls and big box retailers are beaten -and amazon becomes a defining phenomenon of the turn of the century-one specific first choice bezos made was books first- his idea if he could be the core of a supply and demand chain with as many different choices as books, then extending to almost any other category would be easy and economic

jack ma began with a different question - when webs and digital connectivity comes to china how can ecommerce be designed to maximise livelihoods and small enterrprise networking- one specific chpivce jack made - alibaba does not need to spend money on stocks- what we need to do is be the data algorith that every shipper wants to connect with

2 american markets had already been designed in many ways such finacial services to the disadvamtage of the poor and advantage of the rich- bezos had to work within those constraints- in china the people had never seen credit cards- there was an opportunity for jack ma to define digital financial trancations to the benefit of all the customers and traders in the system- moreover timing was such that cards werent needed-alipay would transfer payments mobile to mobile- this also meant that ant financial had more comploete data on who to trust in market both as buyer and seller- and this could fit with his livelihood and include villagers vision

3 amazon' journey shows how much more competitive us digital world was as well as how amazon had to adapt from assumption pc was main personal devive to smart phonres 13 years later
amazon needed to wait til dotcoms were disappearing before it went into other categories- meanwhile it needed to take on incumbents in book retail eg barnes and noble- eg launching audio book recorder
as amazon tarted to go into many categories, developing prime loyalty program made sense as did alexa ai assistant- amazo took over whole foods and bercame a leader in cloud services

mainly ma waited to after subprime mess and leapfrog to smarthpones making efinance arguably as big as ecommerce for ma-ma had chosen greatly synergetic funders and partenrs in jerry yang who saw how japan yahoo and alibaba could foit and masa son sotbank; ma designed 2 parallel ecommecre system taobao for smes and village integration- the mall for global brands and the largest ever one day shopping event

ma was always into cloud and data - he was also keeping his promise to youth and sme futures

 this suited china needs to support massive youth stsarups- by 2015 5 million startups weere launching around the BAT whise 3 ecosystems complemented each other

ma is an ebullient showman coming from an acting familyhttps://www.ewtp.org/documents.html

- he was in his element being sdg hoswt of china g20 putting hangzhou on the map in a way it hadnt been since marco polo and the silk road

from 2019 ma has gone back to his forst life teaching and is also un ambassadr for youth liverlihoods in the developing world- ma belives hal;f of youth everywhere will be unemployable unless we take schooling outsde classroom and eg make digital communiyty building apprenticeships accessible to all

4 its hard to compare everything but the way china's infrastructure is deesigned to include everyone it seems that deliveries are 3 or more times cheaper for everyone nojt just big aacounts of shipping-they are also faster and have made gps apps in china world leading in ways that can be surrprising to americans

hafl of all behavioral data ever collected emerged in 2010s with 100 timews more analytic capacity- in the far east governments study that, in america delegates are clueless- from this perspective bezos move to be dc-based may be 5 years too late- his persopnal facination with out of space races looks a waste compared with ma's focus on urgent sokutions we earthlings need- ma in 2020 has been in the middle of sharing with the world wuhan nurses handbook- bezos seems to be silent on this- its true that amazon is pledging to be carbon zero by 2040 but again you may interpret this as bezos focusing on what he controls not what communities need to empower- all of this needs reflecting on in terms of personal interactions - take for example americas 5 richest tech billionaire such as gates, zucenberg and above all bezos- do they have any coalition projects for community usa in general and education in particular- compare that with china's two ma's and robin li-

we try and make more detailed comparisons at www.alibabauni.com and www.amazonuni.com