[Frencil]

The retail comparison is apples to oranges, in my opinion. Amazon is purely eCommerce, no brick-and-mortar, so the comparison is strongest when considering other eCommerce outfits.

Consider a site like NewEgg. At ~250M annual revenue they're an appreciable fraction of Amazon's size with a lot of catalog overlap. Certainly for commodotized consumer electronics they are direct competitors.

I think the difference the author is trying to articulate is that NewEgg's overlap with Amazon (for example) is considerably less impactful on Amazon than, say, Samsung's overlap with Apple. Phones and tablets are a huge proportion of Apple's profit generation - an area where they cannot afford to be dethroned. With Amazon and consumer electronics, having NewEgg overtake more of their sales in that area would hurt, but Amazon has such a vast catalog that the company, investors, and stockholders know they'll soldier on in a variety of other markets.

That's Amazon's power. Apple's no one-trick pony but they are a pony with a countably limited number of tricks. Amazon is a platform for selling anything and everything. They've abstracted out their distribution network to adapt to selling the Next Big Thing before it's even been conceived. Competitors can take a swipe at a chunk of their market but at the end of the day they're in so many markets that it's a truly monumental task to dethrone Amazon in any meaningful way.