Amazon is successful because they are fine with taking losses, only just recently making a small amount of profit compared to their scale.
Being public means that the company is transparent, not that it is out of control.
it depends on who the investors/share holders are and the balance between lots of small investors and a few large investors.
as long as investors see a way to make money out of the ceo (dividends or rock-star growth pushing share price up) they are happy.
and all of that pushes thinking towards making targets for the quarter or year.
and if it get's bad enough -> not enough money being made -> people being put on the board to mind things -> eventual ousting.
do you want a visionary to spend their time thinking of the next great idea or how to keep the money people happy?
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The least creative person has enough ideas to bankrupt even the biggest company if you start a team to implement them all as the idea occurs (a car obviously takes more people than a paper notepad, but you should expect to have all those ideas)
A visionary who never thinks about money will eventually run out, or worse bounce between ideas and never finish one. The person who only thinks about money will not invest in the things required to continue making money.
I've heard it stated that you need a visionary CEO and a close second who is a financial realist. The visionary has lots of great ideas, the financial realist reigns them in and forces the visionary to choose which vision(s) to focus on and finish; and let the others go. This works great until the visionary CEO steps down (dies, retires...), when you put the realist second in charge all the visionary projects are stopped, for a couple quarters the company makes more money, but there are no visionary things in the pipe so the company dies a slow death.
Musk doesn't want to be beholden to shareholders because their interests (profit) might not align with his objectives (Mars). Presumably Bezos does not fear any such misalignment of interests between himself and his shareholders.
That may just be bloviating on his part, but it does seem at least sensible on the surface.
His biography definitely seemed to emphasize keeping SpaceX private until Mars starts to unfold
Amazon's reference point is Wal-Mart. They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business.
Another good comparison in Microsoft in 80's and 90's. MS dominated over IBM, Apple and others several decades with sup-par product everybody hated by attacking and destroying potential competitors, not by improving products.
Bezos knows what he is doing.
If you sink all of your profits into expansion, then on the books you made zero profit. If you made zero profit, you pay zero taxes. This is a common tactic with farmers. They use this year's returns to buy next year's supplies. If amazon stopped growing and suddenly reaped their profits, there would be a big tax bill to go with it.
MS-NET, LAN Manager and MS/IBM joint effort with OS/2 LAN Server were all inferior to Netware. MS battled decades against Novell with inferior products and shady market practices eating their profits. Finally Novell was taken down and crumbled when networking became a core system component in PC operating systems.
Throwing money against to superior product from smaller competitor until you can eat their lunch is proven tactic.
That seems... reasonable.
It applies to at least: MSDOS, Windows, Office and most of its products, Internet Explorer, SQL Server
In fact it was so well known that's how things worked, it was a saying that they only finally got things right by version three.
The switch to touch screen and adverts all over your library & store is really jarring. So much so that my tech friends now just buy second hand kindle 4s when their old ones break.
It's possible that library lock in will stop them migrating away from kindles when the supply of kindle v4s runs out but not I think certain.
Some purists would prefer to avoid buying DRM'd products in the first place (and I do when I have an alternative), but this is "second best" to me - I'll tolerate easily breakable DRM, but not one I can't remove.
The upside is reduced lock-in - it may affect usability (the Kindle app is still the best reader app I've used for Android as well - if anyone has recommendations for any actually usable ebook reader Android apps I'm all ears) but I know I can read all my books on any device, using free/open apps.
The only real benefit of kindle is the library selection and prices. The ereader software itself is mediocre.
I thought this tired narrative was almost over? For decades Amazon chose to invest in infrastructure and logistics.
Now they're "making a small amount of profit compared to their scale"? Who's at that same scale setting the bar for profit? Remember that "scale" doesn't equal revenue.
I love EC2 but not a big fan of their other more advanced services. I tried Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE... for IaaS and they just didn't have the same richness of features and flexibility as EC2.
http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/59123ef6dd089554...