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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

In retrospect the idea of selling everything online was the first great idea. Even if it was a bit of rehash of Sears I think they were the only one that had that vision.

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.

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We are firing on all cylinders

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 marketplace makes me use Amazon less now. I don't care if there are 40 5v-DC power bricks and 10 of them are 10% cheaper. I care about vetted products and the confidence I'm buying the product I'm looking for.

Honestly for little stuff like that I'd rather go straight to the source from aliexpress than bother with Amazon as the middleman

For fun... what are the major “bad” plays they’ve made?

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.

Eh? The MMO seems to be doing ok in pre-release. It was the MOBA that bombed hard.

Ah that might be what I was thinking of, haven’t played either.

The phone is the most notable miss.

They've also made a clone of pretty much every other ecommerce site without any real successes.

The media part could be about owning the consumer, even at a loss, or owning the providers, or preventing Google from approaching the user login market to tight, etc.

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