| 1) "very difficult to extricate costs of server farms that support the retail operation from server farms that host client services from overall operating costs." Not only is not not hard to do, they are almost assuredly already doing it. 2) It matters a lot, and the article does not miss the point. As for 1 - AWS Retail is a 'customer account', and they can track and measure the services used. They have to do this because that's how 'management accounting' works. 'Accounting' is not just a 'GATT' thing, it's also for measuring how profitable units and businesses are. AWS services used by a product will be charged not only to AWS services but even internally to a product account at Amazon Retail. As for 2 - it matters a lot because Amazon is dumping on Amazon retail, which may be an anti-competitive practice. Not only does AWS show x% contribution to profit, but it's also probably much worse: Amazon Retail may be significantly in the red after 25 years of operation, subsidized by AWS. Given Amazon's size and leverage in retail, it's definitely time to look at breaking them up in order to separate the two businesses. In normal times, this would be 'good for America' for obvious reasons. But in a 'big global economic fight' - it might be better from a nationalist perspective to let it go on at AWS, G, Oracle, MS etc. Has anyone noticed all the big, fat successful cloud players are only ever built by companies with zillions to spare? Implying that this is huge competitive advantage of America vis-a-vis other nations (and continents) who can't hope to compete without government intervention. AWS/Amazon Retail is an anomalous cojoining of businesses, which is fine, but it probably needs to be looked at along with the overlapping of the other cloud providers and their main businesses. |