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Comment by wonder_bread | Hacker News Reader

It’s amazing to watch all this happen on the consumer end but how many more industries can they really do this to? Is Bezos not essentially setting up his successor for failure by turning Amazon into a conglomerate with razor margins in so many areas?

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This is the thing that I don't understand about the big companies like Google, Apple, Amazon. What's the endgame? Do you just keep going until you accidentally implode? It's not like there is a finish line they can cross to "win the game". It just goes on forever until something implodes.

It literally just (1) keeps printing money for investors and (2) keep some people employed. Ambitious people will take the mantle every 15-20 years and do more of 1 and 2 until they make a mistake.

The goal of a successful company is basically serving those two sets of people, Google may enter the retail market or real estate, or McDonalds will take over Cloud Computing -- they're all just trying to get a consistent return.

> keeps printing money for investors

Amazon doesn't give money to investors. Late investors give money to early investors. (Edit: Amazon has bought back some shares in the past, but that's far from even offsetting all the shares given away to employees...)

> Amazon doesn't give money to investors.

You mean "Amazon hasn't given (much) money to investors so far". It's an important distinction, whether you agree with their argument or not.

The finish line is full automation. There isn't some breakthrough that's going to happen overnight, you are watching it be created in slow motion by Amazon & Walmart. They are slowly working out every issue in their supply chain until its perfect. Once they finish society gets to move on to its next phase.

i think the theory is that Amazon's ultimate goal is to dominate all of commerce in its entirety, which is obviously impossible. However, if you consider that as the end goal, Amazon is really far from achieving it. And as long as Amazon can continue to build parts of this impossible machine in a way that does not deteriorate the system (i.e cause major losses that hold back the company), the value of the system will keep going up as the Amazon machine consumes more and more of the world's commercial activities. Since it's practically impossible to achieve that end goal, within any reasonable number of lifetimes, bezos's and amazon's wealth is unlikely to decline without government intervention.

At some point, I guess, they have to collide with the US government. I don't mean in minor ways (like access to iPhone) but in a big existential way.

I think retail has always had the problem of margins. It's tough, but if you're big enough you probably end up with the resources to ride out difficult times. So being huge might be the right play here.

In a way this is supposed to be the end-goal of free markets right? No profit left for companies to have?

Well why not? It's working out well for them so far.

Razer thin margins are still better than the zero margins that they would recieve by NOT entering the market.

If it is possible to make any money at all, then there is no reason not to take it.

Opportunity cost. They don't have an endless supply of cash (though it may seem like it).

They should be going into high margin markets, not just markets that have a minuscule profit margin.

AWS is their high margin product.

It seems to be their strategy is to enter markets that traditionally have razor margins, but the margin can be increased with careful application of technology or scale.

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