The irony is domains like books.com sounded like a sure winner but that only works for books. How would Jeff be doing today if he ran books.com and just sold ... books. bookswebservice (BWS) doesn't have that same ring to it.
Second great idea was free 2 day shipping with Prime. Great for their cash flow and customer retention.
Third great idea was AWS.
Still TBD are advertising and the marketplace. They make a lot of money but at the long term risk of customer satisfaction.
Also TBD are the media plays (Twitch, video,music,.etc.). Not clear if they will ever make money.
And yet, reviews are still horribly broken and have been for years. Also counterfeit products and books are everywhere on the site.
Amazon is going to have to fix those hugely important things before I'll buy the Kool-Aid that they're "firing on all cylinders", which is just CEO pep talk.
The phone is probably the first that comes to mind.
That big MMO they tried to release was pretty bad.
I’m gonna try and predict the future and suggest their LotR original series will be bad.
They've also made a clone of pretty much every other ecommerce site without any real successes.