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That kind of sounds like Berkshire Hathaway. Or an private equity fund for that matter.

A business which owns businesses.

Amazon is taking the concept to the extreme in that it starts its businesses.

Right, but Amazon doesn't want to own businesses so much as own the business infrastructure.

I don't think this is unique to Amazon. Because that transaction costs have become so low(and becoming lower), almost everything is out-sourceable, and naturally in many fields there are advantages to scale, and network effects - common characteristics of infrastructure - a lot of business tasks are becoming infrastructure-like.

Amazon maybe saw it before others. But also, they are in a position that enables them to gradually take more parts of that emerging infrastructure, by owning the customer.

But let's say every stable, low-risk, repeatable task is outsourced outside of businesses into a few large corps. Can new businesses live in that environment? And how will competition look like ?

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