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Zednark
If not, what happened to them?
hermit
Online stores persist, but Amazon is gone. My guess: The Crash of 2029 wiped it out. Maybe it merged into Harris-3M before, though, given that this company built a number of (now abandoned) space habitats in the mid-to-late 20s.
Zednark
Is it also possible they never existed? The alternate history stuff starts sometime around 1989, so it's possible.
hermit
Sure, that's also possible. Hoewever, as a general rule, the Internet existed in SR. It just died in 2029.
Beta
QUOTE (Zednark @ Dec 6 2016, 02:58 AM) *
Is it also possible they never existed? The alternate history stuff starts sometime around 1989, so it's possible.


I’d go with this, or something similar. While the internet existed, from my reading of the timeline history there really wasn’t anything to suggest that it became as pervasive or powerful as in our timeline. Which could be easily enough explained, given the corporate power we see in the SR timeline: instead of a wide open net, which made room for innovative start-up companies to grow rapidly, it became something that mostly kept subscribers captive to their providers (think AOL, but with even less access to the broader net). Innovations would still have happened, but a lot more slowly (when battling for subscribers it is often cheaper to offer gimmicks, feel good ads, and short term discounts than to engage in research or take a risk on disruptive technology).

(I don't think that this is at all unlikely; I think we were very fortunate to end up with the wide open web that we have, for all its various faults.)

That would have probably have been enough to keep players like Google and Amazon much smaller, as they would likely have to had to mostly be a supplier of technology and process to the various internet suppliers, keeping a much smaller slice of the revenue pie and being far more likely to be locked out in favour of home-grown solutions.

All just IMO.
Sengir
If you assume the internet developed at least a bit like it does in the real world, also bear in mind that Amazon are the biggest provider of cloud services by a huge margin (about a third of the market, IBM and MS are the closest competitors at 10% each). The crash virus targeted big agglomerations of computing power, so AWS would have been a giant target.

That said, I tend to push the idea that online stores with drone delivery make access to everyday items trivial as long as you are in a civilized part of the plex. If your plan requires a can of spray foam and three black gloves, the goods will be delivered within the hour.
Mantis
QUOTE (Sengir @ Dec 6 2016, 02:56 PM) *
That said, I tend to push the idea that online stores with drone delivery make access to everyday items trivial as long as you are in a civilized part of the plex. If your plan requires a can of spray foam and three black gloves, the goods will be delivered within the hour.


This sort of thing is likely something Stuffer Shack provides in the more civilized parts of town. Hell, you could probably get clothing custom made and delivered that way too. An AR tailor takes the measurement, sends it out to a nanofax and the completed clothing is delivered to your home by drone. You never need to leave your home and fight through the masses at the mall to get what you want.

As too the original question, I favour the idea Amazon (and Google and similar companies) just never existed much as Beta outlined. Corporate power was already moving towards extraterritorial privilege in the 90s with 1999 bring the Seretech decision that allowed corporations to have essentially standing armies. In our own timeline, this is around the time (late 90s - early 2000s) the tech bubble was building or at its height, which is when Google and Amazon really got their footholds. Without that open internet and tech bubble there would be no Amazon and the SR timeline seems to go counter to the idea of a free and open internet which means if there was a tech bubble, it was in house with the innovations kept by the large corporations already in existence. Start ups were probably gobbled up as soon as they showed any promise.
hermit
QUOTE
I’d go with this, or something similar. While the internet existed, from my reading of the timeline history there really wasn’t anything to suggest that it became as pervasive or powerful as in our timeline. Which could be easily enough explained, given the corporate power we see in the SR timeline: instead of a wide open net, which made room for innovative start-up companies to grow rapidly, it became something that mostly kept subscribers captive to their providers (think AOL, but with even less access to the broader net).

A few points:
* AOL (under the name of UCASOL) exists in Shadowrun and is one of the largest Matrix service providers in the world. It also maintains the UCAS' national grid, called UCAS Online. It is a subsidiary of Renraku Americas.
* The Shadowrun internet was wide open. that was its doom. The Matrix was designed specifically to prevent the Crash of 29 from reoccurring by being made of failsafes and a lot more restricted. See Mercurial, Virtual Realities, Matrix. The crash also took a lot of technological knowledge with it, and cut off a number of - mostly deserted and never really recovered - space habitats (Shadowplay, Lone Wolf, Matrix, Target: Wastelands).
* What about today's internet is wide open and gives a lot of room for innovation? If anything, the internet has developed exactly into the Shadowrun Matrix' structure - a few powerful corporations control (and censor, and use to brainwash) the publically accessible internet - Alphabet, Tencent, Facebook, Baidu, Amazon - while a hidden, shadowy second internet exists, more or less hidden from public view (and tolerated by the internet-controlling corporations) - and I don't think ShadowLand is any more corny than dark web.
Gilga
Perhaps they were merged with some bigger cooperation?
hermit
Harris-3M - the space colonization corp tat died in the Crash - is my personal favourite, though I think Musk and other Valley Boys would rather have sold their previous companies (maybe to Ares? They do own Mercury Express, acombined online store and delivery service) to be free of baggage for their exercise in chasing scifi fairytales.
Sengir
QUOTE (Mantis @ Dec 7 2016, 02:47 AM) *
This sort of thing is likely something Stuffer Shack provides in the more civilized parts of town.

Stuffer Shack would certainly be a big player since they already have the distribution centers in place, but drone delivery should really be as trivial as ordering stuff by mail is today. A lot of businesses which cater to shadowrunners would probably even prefer delivery over showing up to the deal in person...
Wakshaani
Amazon's quite dead, yeah. The general rule of thumb is this: Would losing the Internet for one year leave your business standing? Amazon wouldn't survive a week sans the net, let alone a year.

Heck, Nestle' up and died in 2007 in Shadowrun. Fraggin' NESTLE'. The name lived on and has been passed around, but it's just a Renraku subsidiary now, a tiny echo of what it used to be.

The Amazon model of online ordering was eventually picked up by about everyone, and as the Matrix grew (took a long time before people would trust it again!) it took an ever-larger share of sales. As noted, by 2078, Dronelivery is big enough that Renraku's introduced a "Gridguide (t,) for the sky" that maintains traffic lines and tracks drones to make sure none go wayward. Crash 2.0 was further back to current Shadowrun than 9/11 was to the US of A, and you can see where a lot of the responses we had are still in place, but where others have gradually fallen by the wayside as normallacy settled in.

Nice and peaceful and stable.

Just the way the corps like it.
hermit
QUOTE
Heck, Nestle' up and died in 2007 in Shadowrun. Fraggin' NESTLE'. The name lived on and has been passed around, but it's just a Renraku subsidiary now, a tiny echo of what it used to be.

When did it stop being a ZIC subsidiary?
Wakshaani
QUOTE (hermit @ Dec 14 2016, 09:57 AM) *
When did it stop being a ZIC subsidiary?


One would imagine it was bought, or traded.

The bigger question would be: What did ZIC get out of the deal?
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