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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.
Amazon these days is AWS and a bunch of side projects paid for by AWS profits.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Corporate America systematically reduced its tax burden and transferred it to individuals. It took the liberties and freedom guaranteed to the living citizens. "Corporations are People!". "Spending money is speech!". "Corporations can claim to have religious beliefs!".
There is a border and building a wall to keep out living people enjoys support from a swath of people. There is no border for corporations. Any foreign person, or even the foreign government, can found a company in USA and get all the protections and rights guaranteed by our constitution.
After betraying everyone, and after spending down all the good will, and after looting the middle class to the point of irrationality where they are voting to hurt themselves,.... what do you expect?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you want an insight into why Amazon is so different and so unlike any other company, you only need to look at their 1997 cover letter to their investors which has been added to every other investor letter since. A quote from the letter: "It’s All About the Long Term We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital." (Source: https://www.amazon.com/p/featu... - 1997 letter is at the end) Unlike most companies, which concentrate on shareholder value or profit or margins, Amazon is focused on one thing and one thing only. BEING THE MARKET LEADER ANY MARKET THEY ENTER. At any cost. Seriously; they care less about profit than they do about being number one in anything they do, no matter what. How do you compete with someone when their only mode is 'full out'? When the only thing they care about is beating you, even if it costs them profit to do so? There's an excellent video that explains this strategy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They're all sharks, but Bezos at least is a multi-disciplinary trained shark. This is where Amazon is succeeding where others are faltering. For instance, Bezos and other managers at Amazon take a 2-day call center training class annually. This puts the CEO and management much closer to the customers than pretty much any other major company in America. And this really does show. Sometimes things go wrong. How long does it take to fix them? If a Prime shipment is late, contact Amazon, no questions asked, and you'll get a free month of Prime. Due to a bug in Google's Profile Fi web site, my name was showing up wrong and was not editable. Contacting customer service, it took SIX WEEKS to get this resolved. There was a bug in geolocating about 6 miles of road in my city, this issue took over a year to resolve. And these are just some quick example, the list however really is endless. Other companies make it impossible to resolve disputes, whereas Amazon tries to resolve things as effortlessly as possible. This makes a world of difference.