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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.
Alibaba is an example. They got going five years after Amazon and are now the same ballpark size. If Alibaba is better at figuring out the western market than Amazon is at getting into the Asian market, then Amazon could be in trouble. Alibaba also has a natural advantage in that their home turf is growing faster than Amazon's.
Isn't it more likely that as soon as the board decides that a person who wears a tie and says Synergy is the best person to run the company the company will fail.
... Tim Cooke. Yeh... a great guy... he's managed to turn Apple from a fashion company into some deranged money laundering company. He uses the massive financial power of Apple to buy money in on country and sell it in another. By exploiting the bonds market as it stands today because all nations need bonds to finance their own spending, Apple has become possibly the most powerful stock market force in history. So long as they can maintain trust, their tremendous cash stock piles will make them ever more powerful. They'll probably reach a point where any blip on their share price can have massive ripple effects throughout the world. We can't go after them, we can't attack them... they're a huge and fragile giant that controls so much of the world's money that they can now forcefully influence governments, they can bully political leaders, they can ignore court judgements... they're untouchable... but they are not a tech or fashion company... that's more of their "Oh yeh... no we aren't money launderers, we sell phones and stuff too"
Look at Cisco. There's a moron at the head cranking up prices like crazy and bullying customers but showing amazing returns on the stocks. And yet, everyone in the rest of the world is starting to look elsewhere now. We can't afford Cisco anymore. Hell my company sold $2 billion of Cisco last year and our Cisco sales forecast is so bad the parent company is basically shutting us down. We just can't sell the shit anymore because Cisco treats their customers so unfairly now. But Chuck Robbins is a moron with a tie trying to rape his customers and then convince those same customers they should simply leave their pants down for a repeat action that won't be so bad next time.
Microsoft almost died because Bill Gates left the company to Steve Balmer. I mean how long did it take from Balmer's exit until Satya Nadella managed to make people trust Microsoft more now than they ever did before? Balmer was the board's true love, he wasn't a nerdy guy like Gates and he could listen to reason and focus only on the share like a good little CEO. And in the mean time, everyone basically ran for their lives. Then came Nadella who focused on product, customer and community and now even I like Microsoft. Shit, in the years Balmer ran it, not a single new product they made succeeded so far as I know.
Apple... Oh lordy lordy lordy... there he is
Dell... haha what happened when Dell became a public company and the board took over?
Amazon will fail. But I honestly believe that, Amazon and Google will eventually be almost forced to merge into a single company. I also think that Walmart and Amazon will either merge or agree to share logistics. So Amazon and Walmart will basically become two web sites to the same thing.
The reason is this... we're past the point where the governments can break Amazon or Apple or Google up anymore. They can simply say no... we don't want to. And then the government can punish them... and they can sway the elections anywhere in the world to get what they want.
Amazon will optimize delivery. They'll kill off the warehouse worker. 90% or more of the entire logistical infrastructure of buying anything will be automated. They'll fight with Chinese companies to gain presence in each country around the world and eventually they will dominate the entire supply chain to the extent that even if you're running your own business, you'll have to buy your materials from Amazon or the Chinese company. There will always be nutjob purists, but to be fair, if Amazon sorts out automated delivery and all the logistics involved and then brings Amazon to Norway (where I am), I think I'll buy everything from them. I assume within a few years, they'll buy out the local companies in Scandinavia.
Amazon will achieve internationally far more than Walmart ever did in the U.S..