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by staybythebay 2642 days ago
The article hints at it.

“all these companies are deliberately spending profligately now to build their brands and win over dense populations of customers, so that in the future they can be more efficiently served. This is the exact playbook that once worked for Amazon.com”

I can’t count how many free Uber/Grubhub promo codes I’ve seen. How much they subsidize their orders, etc.
1 comments
dragonwriter 2642 days ago
It's also the the exact model that's failed for countless companies you've never heard of, because they failed.

Amazon was (at least for a long time, maybe this has been forgotten) been noted for being unusually, perhaps uniquely, successfully at both the customer side and investor side when it came to executing on this.

link
Johnny555 2642 days ago
Though I wonder how successful they'd have been if they didn't discover a goldmine (AWS) that helps fund the retail side.

It'd be a lot harder to compete against entrenched retailers like Walmart if they didn't have the money from the AWS side (not to mention essentially unlimited compute power to handle shopping traffic spikes).

link