[WoahNoun]

>Amazon, for example, has been hoisting a giant middle finger to MBA dogma for years with their overinvestment

This is not a great way to think of Amazon. Amazon is basically a VC that only funds internal "start-ups" and "unicorns." You still go to Bezos and the leadership team with a business plan, financial model, path to profitability, market fit, differentiation, competitors, TAM/TAM growth, and "is it a land grab?"

They do not fund "interesting ideas for the sake of interesting ideas" like the Google X projects. Even the most secretive Amazon projects tend to tie pretty closely to their existing businesses and strategies when they are revealed.

Also, not sure if this is still true, but Amazon was the #1 largest hirer of MBAs from top programs for a couple years.

[wpietri]

As I explained elsewhere, Alphabet's moonshot investments are a different kind of investment than the what Amazon has been making for decades. But Amazon has been investing very heavily in changing the nature of buying stuff. To much grumbling from people who preferred profit.

15 years ago Bezos could have retired rich and turned it over to a standard CEO, who would have milked their then-excellent position commanding a large and growing share of ecommerce. And he would have been applauded by a lot of analysts, etc. But instead he's put titanic sums of money into making what are, at least on paper, pretty modest gains in terms of purchasing friction and latency. Is 2 days really that much better than 3-7 days? Is next-day and same-day really better still? The customers' answer is "fuck yes!" But it wasn't clear up front, at least to a lot of investors and commentators, that it was really worth tens of billions in capex.

In both cases, what I'm talking about here is investments that go beyond the time horizon of most companies. If you measure them by the average company (which has a much shorter exec and CEO tenure), of course they'll look bad.