How ruthless is Amazon, really?

I do.

They're in a quiet, desperate search for a new line of business to justify a trillion dollar valuation as ad tech revenue gets chipped away at by privacy regulation and eyeballs drawn to other networks. They even rebranded their whole identity around a moonshot idea for one.

Poaching little startups is something you might be able to see here and there but isn't something they can or do distract themselves with overall; not nearly to the degree or scale that Amazon does.

For Amazon, it's a top line business stragy. For Facebook, it's something a manager here or there might drive for a little attention.

Forums are alive and well. When I look at the forums I was active in pre-FB, about half are still up and active.

/S

Evidence of this? Because I mean, the obvious retort would seem to be, "well then the retail could come back then?"

Like, destroying mom and pop shops so that you can just leave seems pointless? Is the idea that people in the community will just shop at a Wal-mart further away then?

We have a lot of cross-disciplinary work to do to keep these paper clip optimizers in check.

Walmart was honing and perfecting this devour-everything strategy long before Amazon was a glimmer in Bezos's eye. They moved into every rural area in the country like a vampire, sucked out every drop of value, undercut to the point where they were the only game in town, converted the previous small business staff into mid- and low-level WalMart drones, and in some cases, skedaddled when the store couldn't make obscene enough profits, leaving the area stripped barren.

>AWS and its 30 percent margins are the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart.

In 2023, AWS had 27% margins while North American retail had 4% margins for Amazon, but that still meant $15 billion in income from North American retail versus $25 billion in income from AWS. By comparison, Walmart US is operating at a 5% margin with about $22 billion in income. Both companies have worse margins internationally.

I agree those numbers make AWS look a bit more attractive, but it doesn't mean they're "the only thing propping amazon up vs Walmart". Walmart is running a bit larger and at slightly better margins, but the difference isn't as stark as you're making it out to be.

All numbers were hastily pulled from recent earnings reports, so apologies if I made any sloppy mistakes.

Bitterness can drive people into severe error when they lose sight of what they actually wanted in the first place. People end up cheering on the second step in the consolidation of markets as schadenfreude against the players in the initial step in the consolidation of markets. What we need is a government that is interested in maintaining competition.

You aren't expected to understand it, you are being asked to accept it as true without questioning.

If an idea can be clearly understood, say like "you need clouds to get rain" then you don't need an ideology to sustain the idea. But if you are selling "rain dances make rain", relying mere rational thinking to propel the idea into the mainstream isn't going get you very far.

The ideology that you're talking about should be more properly called "laissez faire", although even that is a misnomer because there's nothing hands-off about the property rights enforcement that underlies all of it.