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How Amazon Became Corporate America's Nightmare (bloomberg.com)

Zorro shares a report from Bloomberg that details Amazon's rapid growth in the last three years: Amazon makes no sense. It's the most befuddling, illogically sprawling, and -- to a growing sea of competitors -- flat-out terrifying company in the world. It sells soap and produces televised soap operas. It sells complex computing horsepower to the U.S. government and will dispatch a courier to deliver cold medicine on Christmas Eve. It's the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits than Southwest Airlines Co., which as of this writing ranks 426th. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person, his fortune built on labor conditions that critics say resemble a Dickens novel with robots, yet he has enough mainstream appeal to play himself in a Super Bowl commercial. Amazon was born in cyberspace, but it occupies warehouses, grocery stores, and other physical real estate equivalent to 90 Empire State Buildings, with a little left over. The company has grown so large and difficult to comprehend that it's worth taking stock of why and how it's left corporate America so thoroughly freaked out. Executives at the biggest U.S. companies mentioned Amazon thousands of times during investor calls last year, according to transcripts -- more than President Trump and almost as often as taxes. Other companies become verbs because of their products: to Google or to Xerox. Amazon became a verb because of the damage it can inflict on other companies. To be Amazoned means to have your business crushed because the company got into your industry. And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it's easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years.

3 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Amazon hurts competition by c6gunner · · Score: 3, Informative

    and its business model is taking away the positives of what Whole Foods did.

    There's nothing positive about what Whole Foods did. It was an immoral corporation like any other, selling overpriced crap to gullible rubes. The kinds of morons who think that buying a couple asparagus stems in a bottle of water for $6 will somehow make them healthier.

    Whatever Amazon does with Whole Foods can only be an improvement.

  2. Don't forget how normal folks see Amazon by SpzToid · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...they know nothing of the size and scope of its cloud. Putting IBM, Google, etc. to shame.

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  3. Re: mazon will crumble by lgw · · Score: 4, Informative

    It is already imploding. Just the other day went for an interview there - five SJW buttholes didn't even read my resume. The whole interviewing at amazon is a farce to hide an ulterior motive - outsource jobs.

    That sort of interview normal for technical jobs in general. The point of your resume is to get a phone call, and it really has no value beyond that - it has done its job and gotten past the arbitrary whims of HR. Sometimes a manager will grill you on something specific on your resume just to see if you're blatantly lying, but that's as far as that goes.

    The actual interview process for tech in general is "OK, now prove you've got the chops". There are no end of pretty resumes, but nothing in a resume actually means you can do the work.

    That being said, Amazon's interview process for developers seems to err on the side of too many soft-skill questions and a lack of deep probing of actual coding talent. It's the opposite of the problem Google has, in my experience, with Google interviews being 100% technical and not so much as a back-and-forth design discussion to measure soft skills (Facebook was the same extreme as Google, but I last talked to them over 5 years ago, so maybe they've changed).

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