[Green_man]

Or maybe he said "company" because Amazon is one, and isn't a university. While an interesting conversation could be had about large companies/small companies/university/individual contributions to progress and invention, Bezos isn't necessarily having that conversation, and certainly isn't obliged to contextualize Amazon's achievements that way.

[runarberg]

I mean, you can say you have the fastest Fiat, no doubt someone will point out that Fiats on average are all slow next to a Ferrari. The you can just point out that we are just talking about Fiats, not Ferraries. But that doesn’t change the fact that the having the fastest Fiat is not that impressive given that Ferraries are an order of magnitude faster then Fiats.

[Green_man]

That's fair, my argument is less that reframing the context is always bad, and more that the original context of [Amazon] in [Companies] makes a lot of sense. I also think that the presented Fiat vs Ferrari is a poor analogy. Why, in your view, are universities so much better than Amazon and other top tech companies? In my view, they're often doing far more than universities on the cutting edge of research. While there are certainly some tradeoffs in a corporate model, I think that universities and tech companies are both effective research organizations, but have different focuses. To use the cars metaphor, it's like some discussion about Ferrari vs Bugatti vs Koenigsegg vs etc. and then someone starts talking about superbikes. Amazon may compete with universities for employees, but they don't directly compete with universities in market share, products, or services.