I've always thought of Amazon as a company whose primary product was their own stock. They had a great model-- their terms with vendors were such that they often had the customers cash for weeks before they had to pay the vendor.

When I worked there the emphasis was always on new press releases. So they created many silly things that never stuck-- like Amazon catalog shopping: They took paper catalogs from other retailers, sent them to the phillipenes to be scanned and then hosted them. Amazon movie times. Amazon local restaurant menus. All of these are now gone.

I worked on the product search engine, and for laughs I like to go back and check the regressions that we worked on during my time there. About 9 months after I left, a key one came back... and it's still there many years later.

I think this is because they simply disbanded the search team. I'm sure it's been since reformulated and disbanded several times. But the regressions in question, by the way, we had automated tests for. We tested for them before we pushed code.... I think those tests have been lost in the chaos.

Amazon was constantly reorganizing.. and products (software products) would get abandoned because the team would be dissipated.

They were also very poorly managed for a "Tech" company. My boss had trained to be a prison guard-- I kid you not-- his degree was in criminal justice. By the time I left, %80 of the team had left for other positions. His boss was one of those old school middle managers who you would expect to be running the DMV. Neither of them were technical- their skills extended to managing email and spreadsheets.

And yet the stock has continued to rise, even on little or no profits.

They're great at selling stock-- look at the P/E ratio.