[jimmy1]

I think Amazon should go back to just being a bookstore, maybe seller of indie items, kind of like that etsy-like nichce and focus on AWS, which is their clear cash cow at this point.

This whole being an "everything" store thing is a drain on them, and a drain on our economy. Plus they aren't exactly winning in some of the categories they thought they would be now -- groceries for example -- Walmart has shown they will fight to the absolute death on that, and I don't think they can win in that space (buying Whole Foods was a nice gesture, but Whole Foods reputation was fading from that "cool grocery store that has all this organic stuff" to "just a really expensive grocery store" especially once all the other grocery stores started carrying organics).

Of course the kicker is if they can release their fully autonomous drone fleet. Which may be what, 10...20 years off after sorting through FAA regulations at the minimum?

[devmunchies]

But wouldn't having a lot of consumer mindshare contribute to their cloud infrastructure being more attractive? People choose names they recognize.

[jimmy1]

AWS was put on the map almost entirely by engineering blogs (which I am not saying is a bad thing -- it's a testament to their services), like the famous Netflix moving everything to AWS article. Before that it was blogs on S3 and SQS. They were well known and generating a billion in revenue as early as 2011, and this was well, well before AWS was "mainstream" in terms of you start seeing public adverts now for AWS everywhere.