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by sacheendra 3240 days ago
That kind of sounds like Berkshire Hathaway. Or an private equity fund for that matter.

A business which owns businesses.

Amazon is taking the concept to the extreme in that it starts its businesses.

1 comments

Right, but Amazon doesn't want to own businesses so much as own the business infrastructure.
I don't think this is unique to Amazon. Because that transaction costs have become so low(and becoming lower), almost everything is out-sourceable, and naturally in many fields there are advantages to scale, and network effects - common characteristics of infrastructure - a lot of business tasks are becoming infrastructure-like.

Amazon maybe saw it before others. But also, they are in a position that enables them to gradually take more parts of that emerging infrastructure, by owning the customer.

But let's say every stable, low-risk, repeatable task is outsourced outside of businesses into a few large corps. Can new businesses live in that environment? And how will competition look like ?