[julianeon]

50 years from now, historians will say...

Amazon's online store was basically an incubator that allowed the company to pivot to its real profit center: virtualized online services for startups and companies seeking to move to the cloud.

[hangonhn]

Or that AWS reduced the cost of its retail operations (no store, no real estate, no staff, etc.) so dramatically that it drove out nearly all its competitors that it became the universal intermediary between buyers and sellers. The profits from its retail operations allowed it to reinvest in its data centers that it achieved ever greater economies of scale. The two arms of Amazon were synergistic.