Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook - you can imagine how a clever competitor can get a foothold to compete in those markets. But Amazon's ownership over the entire physical logistics supply chain through to last-mile delivery is just such a huge moat that keeps getting larger and larger.
Walmart’s website has identical functionality for selling retail goods, including third party sellers. Target is not far behind. Newegg is all third party goods as far as I understand.
Then there is Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Staples, Kroger, Albertsons, Dollar Tree, and myriad other retailers.
Amazon Music is easily replaced by Apple/YouTube/Spotify.
Amazon Video is easily replaced by myriad other streaming services.
Contrast with my choice of smartphone operating system - Google or Apple.
Or choice of operating system in corporate environments with legacy software - Microsoft. Ditto for spreadsheet software.
Even in cloud, AWS is up against Google and Microsoft.
Where is this idea of Amazon being a monopoly coming from? They even earn pitiful profit margins compared to the other tech companies.
Amazon Music and Video are value adds, but not why people give Amazon money.
Walmart+ is close. But prime shipping is not that big of a competitive moat. I order from all the other retailers all the time, and stuff comes in 2 to 3 days also.
The killer feature none of those you've listed has been able to achieve is the shipping logistics. This enables their vast selection to be more than just window dressing; contrast this with say Best Buy if the part or item isn't at a local store.
Meanwhile, there have been quite a few previously thriving retailers whom are now either on life support or gone. Anecdotally, I watched several major chains die at the hands of the one upon a time up- and-coming Amazon.com. The number of book stores alone that were killed off is tragic.
https://www.moneytalksnews.com/9-major-companies-face-threat...
https://ilsr.org/fact-sheet-how-breaking-up-amazon-can-empow...
The commenter is responded to compared Amazon to the other big tech companies. Profit margin is an indicator of how much control a business has over its market. You cannot earn high profit margins if your customers can go somewhere else if you increase your prices, which means low profit margins means competitors exist.
Shipping logistics is not a huge thing. UPS/FedEx/USPS do what Amazon’s logistics do. All the other retailers also have warehouses (including their stores) all over the US. You might have to wait 1 or 2 or 3 days longer to receive the item, but it is not huge.
I would guess book stores would have gone out of business anyway, due to the ease of shipping books and the lack of urgency of people needing them. Little reason to pay all the capital and labor costs of running a book store if book buyers do not mind buying online. And of course, ebooks came along anyway.
The big competitive advantage Amazon had in earlier years was they did not have to collect sales tax from customers in most states, and they arbitraged that into gaining market share and allowing them to invest in their logistics and expand without incurring heavy losses. But that has been gone for 5 years since the South Dakota v Wayfair ruling in mid 2018.
None of the companies you list are monopolies. Google is the closest in terms of market share but even that is a weak case. It is impossibly easy to get to Bing or DuckDuckGo, and there is the obvious, massive lateral threat that is chatgpt and other llm’s.
Amazon is about 40% of the e-commerce market. Much much less of retail.
The wave of consolidations that has been basically non-stop since the Reagan administration has left us with way too few competitors in way too many markets. We in tech are just particularly blind to it because of the platform duopoly that has seemed "natural" since the first major platform war between Microsoft and Apple in the '90s—there's this feeling that of course there will be a fight between a small number of competitors, and of course we'll end up with one company holding the lion's share of everything, partly due to network effects.
In a truly healthy, competitive economy, we wouldn't even be able to list the number of prominent online or brick & mortar retail companies in the "top tier" on both our hands.
https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/06/amazon-net-income-by-year-gr...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/profit...
If their reports claim AWS profits are now offsetting losses in retail, then I guess their retail division has started losing money in the last few years for some reason. Which is odd given COVID landing in their lap.
You are ignoring the much bigger retailer that has owned a similarly complex and integrated logistics supply chain for decades. Walmart. And they do it with a lot more stuff.
So no one is too big to fail or compete.
Google is still what everyone thinks of when they want to search the web, despite how bad its results have gotten in recent years. Even actual alternative search engines, like DuckDuckGo, are still very minor players in comparison.
Google (err Alphabet) is so completely dominant in search (93.125 world marketshare) and video (97.42%), and not far behind in mobile operating systems (70.89%) [and I found both of these numbers by using Google]. Of course marketshare on its own is not a particularly strong argument for breaking a company up, but Google could be a lot more evil than Amazon, if it wanted to.
Sears, JCPenney, Bed Bath and Beyond are just a few dominoes to have already fallen.
Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc. embraced the 21st century and are doing just fine. Others like Chewy only came about as a result of the new trends.
BB&B bought its way into bankruptcy by taking on debt to fund a multi-billion dollar stock buyback; external competition (including Amazon but primarily Walmart) was a secondary factor.
It is not Amazon, it is online shopping in general. They never were going to survive a world where their competition can sell the same goods without having all the capital and labor expenses of a storefront.
A few of the big ones will survive due to convenience, but the niche stores where you do not need the product today or tomorrow have no competitive advantage against a website, outside of a few high end stores where richer people can afford to pay extra for the shopping experience.
Google really doesn't have enough room to be evil even if they tried - they've already exhausted most avenues that they could and failed. Imo, Google is actually under threat - if someone were to credibly show in detail how useless Google Ads actually are or how flawed/falsified their performance metrics are (perhaps via internal leaks a la Facebook, etc), Google could easily end up losing a lot of ad customers.