[gideon_b]

This has always been Amazon's strategy. Amazon is not a server company, an ecommerce company, a grocer, or any of the other seemingly random things they do.

The common thread running though all of their lines of business is to create businesses with complex problems, solve those problems incredibly well, then sell those solutions to other companies. Amazon uses themselves as their first-and-best customer [1]. AWS, Prime and all of their best solutions work in this way. The whole company is organized to support this strategy.

The fact that Amazon is expanding their warehouse capabilities beyond their needs and building deeper into the stack by getting into real estate development is a natural continuation of this strategy.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2016/the-amazon-tax/

[deanCommie]

An extremely relevant recent update: https://stratechery.com/2022/beyond-aggregation-amazon-as-a-...

[Spooky23]

I’d love to see Ben partner with a smart tax/finance guy.

His analysis is interesting, but very slanted with the tech business viewpoint. The cringy canonization of Uber back in the day is a great example. IMO, these machinations by Amazon are probably more about financial engineering than anything else.

Amazon has a good distribution network, but Shopify, Walmart and Target seem to have found and are competing successfully at Amazon’s weak points. Many people I know pivoted to Target for consumer staples vs Amazon. You can have anything they carry in about 30m. Shopify seems to be the place for sellers who want to protect their brand and avoid being ripped off within days.

Not sure why Ben cares about an Amazon truck vs UPS delivering stuff he’s probably alone in that.

[diogenes_of_ak]

Amazon isn’t a company, it’s a paper clip maximizer that’s goal is to “acquire money” and it’s doing so exponentially