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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.
Not having had my coffee yet, I read "One day Amazon will be fair."
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.
Obviously the author of the article meant to catch eyeballs with that title but he did a huge disservice to Bezos and all the readers by choosing such a title.
Because the title says the exact opposite of what Bezos said. He didn't say we need to delay the demise of Amazon. Read the 2 simple quotes in the article & submission. Bezos is saying they need to delay the onset of focusing on their survival and stay focused on the customer as long as possible. This will keep Amazon alive. Once Amazon starts focusing on itself, the beginning of the end starts.
The article's title implies that Amazon is already looking at itself and thus is well on its way to its end. Bezos is saying they need to delay getting to the start of such a day.
This is a case of the reporter not understanding wisdom and passing on their misunderstanding to those they are supposed to educate.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
Minor correction: ... so long as the steps needed to do that don't interfere with their personal life styles or personal business interests.
Most I know generally try to make the world a better place...
There are plenty of other forces ready to unseat Amazons spot.
Where? Point to them. Amazon is dominating retail, and that's not even their most profitable business. AWS produced something like $300M more than retail in net profits for Amazon last year. The fact that they're in these two businesses specifically is the key to their ongoing success. These days, a site like Amazon is mostly in the cloud anyway, so in order to compete with Amazon, someone else would have to become them. But good luck undercutting them in both of those markets... You basically already have to have the cloud on standby. Who's got that? Microsoft, Oracle. Neither one could feasibly defeat Amazon in retail.
I think that Amazon is safe until the way we do business changes again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Different companies in different lines of business, but all of their bankruptcies have the same cause:
Massive debt, resulting from leveraged buyouts. Most of them led by Bain Capital (you may remember their former CEO, Mitt Romney).
Mitt Romney stopped being involved in day-to-day operations of Bain Capital in February 1999 so he could work on the SLC Winter Olympics. He officially left Bain Capital in early 2002.
Bain Capital's relationship with Toys-R-Us began in 2004 - 2 years after Mitt Romney left.
"On 20 July 2008, iHeartRadio "announced the completion of a merger with an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of CC Media holdings, Inc., a corporation formed by a private equity group co-lead by Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P." source. Roughly 6 years after Romney officially left Bain.
In 2005 Vornado Realty Trust bought 7.5 million shares of Sears Canada. Vornado was also involved with Bain Capital in taking over Toys “R” Us, which took over KB Toys resulting in 3,400 jobs lost." source. Note this source is extremely anti-Romney and places the date of acquisition as 2005 - years after Romny left Bain.
The June 2008 issue of SF Guitar Tech includes the sentence: "Bain Capital, an equity fund that was founded by 3 people, including Mitt Romney (take that in whatever way you want), recently bought Guitar Center for 2.1 Billion dollars." Again, years after Romney left Bain.
There is a lot of irony in the history of Sears. Sears was the original Amazon. Sears aggressively made use of a new technology as it was rolled out throughout the country to reach a massive customer base and flourish - modern transportation. As roads, and especially rail, began to be built and improved across the country Sears capitalized on it to create a massive mail order business. Rural areas might only have a few small stores, but if they had a train depot, then they had access to the entire Sears catalog. You could buy any part for your tractor from Sears, or even an entire set of materials needed to build a house (literally).
Then Sears began to roll out brick and mortar stores - a natural progression for a large retail business with lots of money. Store fronts are like bragging rights - a tangible, physical way to show off the power and size of your business. Eventually mail order declined significantly, and their catalogs were primary an advertising tool to get people into stores.
Then came the internet, and Sears did not capitalize on it as they could have. That opened the door for Amazon to beat Sears at its original game. It's so ironic that one of the things forcing Sears out of business is being undercut by mail-order shopping.
Less than two months ago Amazon opened its first brick and mortar store in New York - Amazon 4-Star. Bragging rights.
What will be the demise of Amazon? Maybe 3D printing purchases regionally and then using drones to handle last-mile delivery? It will be some technology that Amazon fails to embrace, letting a new competitor get a leg up on them.
Better known as 318230.
Sears wasn't Bained, it was run by an idiot who put a flawed ideology, based upon a reading of Ayn Rand, as the centerpiece to Sears' strategy. Divisions were purposefully put at war with one another for no good reason, destroying the entire point of having them be part of the same company in the first place. There have been numerous fiascos causing so much in losses that stores closed even before the bankruptcy, the most infamous being one where Sears didn't extend opening hours in the run-up to Christmas one year because none of the divisions wanted to be the one proposing it, and thus forced to pay for it.
Eddie Lampert had enough evidence to realize he and the ideology he was using was running the company into the ground but continued to do so anyway, apparently oblivious to the damage he was doing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.