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by smacktoward 4763 days ago
Do we really want other companies to be like Amazon? If the Amazon endgame is "own the entire retail sector," I'm not sure that we ("we" meaning "society at large", not just "Amazon shareholders") want any company to be like Amazon... even Amazon.

Not to mention that when the endgame is "own the entire retail sector," even if other companies want to be like Amazon, in the end they'd have to kill Amazon to do it. Owning the entire retail sector is incompatible with the existence of lots of thriving alternatives. It's like the Highlander -- there can be only one.

1 comments

And, don't forget the rather nasty consequences of Amazon's ability to operate on no margins: it kills all their competitors who have to actually profit to stay alive. When Amazon moves into your market, your company is probably in big trouble. Really, thats good in the very short term (lower prices for consumers), but bad in the long term (because once amazon controls everything, theres no reason to keep their margins so low).