Amazon Business

This is obviously the right thing for Amazon to do and will be a success. The question is, why didn't they do it 10 years ago? As someone who worked at Amazon 10 years ago, at that time, adding lines of business was a key desire of the company-- eg: Amazon France, the Cell phone store, etc.

The reason it wasn't done then, is that Amazon is a poorly built system from a software viewpoint. So much of the code makes so many assumptions and is built to fit with particular other code. They talk about "service oriented architecture" but like the "doordesks" (Which actually cost more than regular office furniture) it's just a slogan.

Amazon's engineering is greatly slowed down by the terrible management and engineer-hostile culture at the company.

AWS was able to avoid that by being insulated as a pet project under the CTO. But amazon.com is still running 1990s code, and today has regressions I personally fixed a decade ago (But the group I was part of got disbanded after %80 of them resigned because our manager was abusive and getting cover from HR anyway.) Yes, that's it, the group that makes a key component of finding products on your site is losing people so just disband it?

Anyway, if they spent more time on things like this, and less time on nonsense like drones Amazon would be a better business.

But Bezos doesn't want Amazon to be a great business- he wants Amazon to be a great stock. As that's what makes him richer.

And on that score, he has succeeded. In large part from these monthly "amazon is innovative!!!!!!1!" propaganda initiatives.