It appears that Amazon cheated in the procurement process. They had a couple of ex-Amazon cloud employees move to the DoD who helped draft the procurement requirements, which seemingly favored Amazon’s cloud. After the contract was sent out for bidding, at least one of them went back to work for Amazon cloud services.
I am a fan of Amazon, shop there all the time because it’s cheap and convenient. I can order a box of tea or coffee, it is cheaper than the market and they deliver it “free”. I don’t know how they can mail me a $10 item the next day and still make money. They have done a lot of good for the American consumer. But they appear to have done so at the expense of many other businesses. The capital markets have subsidized their retail losses for ages. Bezos is brilliant in so many ways - For years I did not understand why he invested so much into technology products like he would somehow compete with Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, IBM etc etc. Now I know. That is where they make their money. They probably lose money on every retail order they ship out but make profits off the cloud and their technology offerings that get them close to breakeven. THey are spending so much on cloud and fulfillment services as it is, that they might as well sub-lease some of their infrastructure to 3rd parties.
If I had figured it out sooner I would have put all my money into Amazon stock.
You are missing a very important part of the startup & income. Itll all come out in discovery. I suspect youll be glad you missed out on this one.
It's quite simple: they can't. Not for ever, anyway.
Amazon is going to do what the banks did vis-a-vis the ATM. They will make you utterly dependent on it, while simultaneously cutting off all other avenues.
In the case of Amazon, they are driving brick-and-mortar stores out of business as you described, offering something 'free' (when in fact they're relying on USPS subsidies to get your purchases to you).
When enough bricks and mortar stores are gone, and the retail infrastructure is destroyed, Amazon will simply start ratcheting up their fees until they own/run 90% of the retail economy in the US. Amazon Prime will be $500/yr with per-piece delivery fees.
Sometime before that, we'll all be yelling to have their trust busted.
the only thing that makes money is the server contracts. Everything else is a break even.
He keeps scaling and as long as previous systems don’t wear out before his latest acquisition comes on board, then he can keep the plates in the air!