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Jeff Bezos To Employees: 'One Day, Amazon Will Fail' But Our Job is To Delay it as Long as Possible (cnbc.com)
Days before Amazon announced the cities it had picked for its HQ2, CEO Jeff Bezos had to address a separate but related concern among employees: Where is all this headed? At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, an employee asked Bezos about Amazon's future. Specifically, the questioner wanted to know what lessons Bezos has learned from the recent bankruptcies of Sears and other big retailers. From a report: "Amazon is not too big to fail," Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting that CNBC has heard. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years." The key to prolonging that demise, Bezos continued, is for the company to "obsess over customers" and to avoid looking inward, worrying about itself. "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible." Bezos' comments come at a time of unprecedented success at Amazon, with its core retail business continuing to grow while the company is winning the massive cloud-computing market and gaining rapid adoption of its Alexa voice assistant in the home.
If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.
That's not quite true unless you are using a rather narrow definition of corporate lifespan. They might only be at the top of their game for 20-30 years but once they get to a certain size they rarely actually die completely in the sense of bankruptcy. They just tend to get absorbed into other companies or shift to a less prominent place in the market. Go look at any company in the Fortune 500. Most of them have been around a LOT longer than 30 years. Apple and Microsoft are already older than 30 years and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Yahoo is/was close to 25 years old as a standalone company but it isn't actually gone, it just got absorbed into another company and that's fairly normal. Amazon has reached sufficient scale that they'd have to do something remarkably stupid to go bankrupt or there would have to be some sort of techtonic shift in the marketplace. Also please recall that Amazon was founded in 1994 so it's already 25 years old and most of that time could properly be described as a large company.
You have to remember that large companies are the ones that survived. The companies that go away before 30 years are the ones that didn't so there is something of a surviviorship bias in play here. It's entirely plausible that Amazon won't be a standalone company 20 years from now but it's pretty unlikely the company will disappear completely.