Color me completely impressed.
It's honestly because of Jeff Bezos that Amazon can succeed without Jeff Bezos.
People honestly do not give Bezos enough credit, not just for what Amazon has achieved, but for what he has achieved within Amazon. Decades from now there will be case studies about the succession planning at Amazon versus other "major" companies of our time which oftentimes revolve around the ego and narcissism of a CEO with too much self-importance to foster any sort of succession within the organization.
Amazon's best years are quite likely still not behind us and will quite likely happen when Bezos is no longer around to see them.
The ability to look long term at Amazon is just fucking amazing.
Google will never ever have that kind of competence.
if I flip it to landscape, the layout looks right, but the button to reveal the search bar (the most important element on a retail homepage) doesn't work. I would be shocked to have that experience with Amazon in the middle of the holidays. it's just throwing away money.
They're caught up exactly because your biggest problem is that the site layout shit the bed. Your complaint wasn't that their business model and logistical infrastructure doesn't let you order stuff to your home on par with amazon.
when you have strong competition, it's not enough to mostly get things right at a high level. the little things matter just as much for earning trust. Amazon gets this. Walmart, apparently, does not. they're a solid second choice if something is sold out elsewhere, I'll give them that.
As an aside, I would love to read a biography of Bezos the individual, not businessman. We all too often shrink the complex lives of humans into labels that fit 280 characters. Alas, that'll likely not happen anytime soon.
(You can listen to the article thanks to the YC-backed Audm. Great content, passable app)
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-je...
There is clearly a spectrum here and blindly labelling all government as useless is wrong.
They refer to the fact that taxes is the pot the government will draw money from whenever any of their enterprises becomes unprofitable. If the pot is too small to fund all the projects they can simply grow out by taxing the populace more.
When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
Tax collection is part of government and in this case is an useful counterexample to the endless "all government is bad" messages we regularly hear on HN.
>When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
Yes, and unpopular governments get voted out (assuming they are democratic).
The Manhatten Project, the New Deal, and the Space Race were remarkably efficient and productive, back in the time that we believed that governments can and should do things, and politicians worked together in good faith.
Then corporate lobbyists bought our politicians and convinced us that governments are evil and inept, and that they shouldn't have to pay taxes because the government will just waste it. So we deregulated everything, and now billionares just waste their record profits on low orbit joyrides instead, while average Americans die preventable deaths because they can't afford healthcare (which the governments of every other developed nation manage to provide their citizens for free).