[piva00]

That only means that Amazon had money enough in the bank for acquiring a potential future competitor, just like most of FAANG has been doing since they became behemoths.

When you have enough money to stamp out any potential competition by simply buying them out I think we can't really rely on comparing management approaches anymore, it's just a finance game: I got more money than you, I will make you go away.

[marcinzm]

That's not my point. My point is that Zappos is not a company anymore and hasn't been for almost 15 years. If it had survived during that time and grown to 5k+ employees then it would be a good example. People keep bringing up hypotheticals but not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics.

[ethanbond]

> not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics

There are plenty of mega-companies that are very, very different and very, very successful. Koch Industries is a good example. Do they manage with a Silicon Valley ethos?

There's a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why there are not other companies in tech who rival these ones, and that's mentioned in my very first post: the consumer software industry naturally lends itself to monopolization, which we also know observationally has been happening.