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by gergi 2661 days ago
I'm not sure how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008 but your second statement is incorrect - AWS only accounts for ~10% of Amazon's revenue. https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/31/amazon-earnings-q4-2018/
1 comments

> how Amazon was mediocre by any measure in 2008

History is there for analysis. The stock falling to April2007 levels in Sept2008 showed serious volatility and hadn't yet declared profits that carried it above Sun and Toy R Us yet. It was somewhere in the top 300 profitable companies. It was still carrying the HUGE debt load that they have been carrying over to enable yet another tax free year in 2018, despite another record year. Quite a bet to make that they would be successful where AWS was just exiting beta. It was completely orthogonal to their barely-on-track online retail business model. It was a meh company and the stock price reflected that.