[MCRed]

Now do Amazon which is a retailer, often running at a loss on the retail side, with a nicely growing Hosting business... but even the margins on the hosting business don't justify Amazon's P/E ratio.

I don't think the market is efficient, it has a lot to do with perception. Amazon, for instance, is constantly doing press releases for products, even products that have no future (this is a deliberate strategy near as I can tell from my time when I worked at Amazon)... while Apple does 3 or 4 product introductions a year, and doesn't do a lot of PR stuff (Though Tim Cook is getting interviewed a lot more than Steve Jobs did.)

[czhiddy]

I have a friend who works at Lab126 with some really interesting stories about the dysfunctional environment there. He's basically one of a handful or so engineers who have more than a 4 year tenure in his division. Their PMs are basically all fresh out of college. After the complete disaster that was the Fire phone, that team and its director got promoted and placed in charge of Lab126. As expected, everything went to shit.

No idea what the rest of the company is like, but internally, Lab126 employees treat it as a stepping stone until their resume or skillset becomes good enough for Apple, Google, etc.