Glenn,
I could go on and on and irritate folks on both sides of this arguement, but I look at the situation with Amazon like this: what they are trying to accomplish, to become a huge internet based retailer from scratch as fast as possible, could not be accomplished any other way than the way they are doing it. Why everyone can't see that is totally beyond my comprehension. The fact that the have altered strategies here and there and switched playbooks just goes with the territory.
The 5 companies that are the best examples of this age are Aol, Yhoo, Ebay, Msft, and Amzn.(yes, msft, which is scrambling to survive using there other incredibly lucrative businesses). You have to not count M because they have infinite money backing them and can make all kinds of mistakes and it won't hurt them too bad. Of the remaining 4, which are all even stronger than 1 year ago when they were also the biggest, Amazon has the toughest job. You know Glenn, that as a retailer,they are doing something more complicated, and more costly than yhoo or aol or ebay is trying to do. Ebay and Yhoo are enormously successful, but Ebay is simply a place to put buyers and sellers together, and they are not faced with the overhead that Amzn has to deal with. Yhoo is amazing, but also not capital intensive, and not dealing as directly with consumers. Aol has a tough, tough jop, so perhaps it should have been Case. Aol has had to fend off MSFT, does deal with consumers directly, has huge infrastructure costs and is a media comany too. Still, I think it is great that Amazon get recognition for having the toughest job in the internet age: starting from nothing, trying to build an enormous web retailer that can compete with the brick and mortar giants. There is now way amazon could have gotten big fast and been profitable. No way. And the pressure they have applied is causing others to change too, Glenn. |
