I don't.

Amazon is successful because of its fast moving, demanding culture. No product is ever left to coast - everyone is pushed to be bigger, faster, cheaper, etc. Amazon realizes this, and does a lot to reinforce its culture internally. They do an excellent job of this, even in remote offices. I think Bezos has done a terrific job of building something that will succeed without him. And that's a good thing for him - he's free to play with space travel, now.

The culture is really pervasive at Amazon. Bezos started it, but now that the pinwheel is spinning, he doesn't need to do much to keep it going.

His major replacement potentials are Andrew Jassy (AWS CEO) and Jeff Wilke (CEO of Consumer, ie e-commerce and logistics). Both of those guys have done a fantastic jobs in the business they are in. I don't think Amazon would want to pull either of them into a roll of owning both though, lest they lose focus. I suspect they'd break them off as separate sub-companies (like Alphabet/Google did), and put someone else as the CEO of the overarching company.

Are you sure this isn't purely a perceived decline? Microsoft's stock is the highest it's ever been and they made a profit of $52B in their last fiscal year.

I think that's mattmanser point. Profits look great and the stock price is happy, but mindshare in the consumer space, and perceived innovative edge (see the huge miss on phones)

Yes, definitely still a great company, but they've lost their complete dominance.

They made $16.7 billion in their last fiscal year, and 2015 and 2016 represented their lowest profits over the past 10 years.

You're using a non-recurring charge to try to make a wider point.

2015 had a $10 billion non-recurring, non-cash charge. Without that, your entire premise collapses.

The easiest way to poke a giant hole in what you're proposing, is to look at cash production from operations, which is the ultimate gauge of profitability. Their cash production the last two years is not the lowest over the past 10 years.

Net operating cash flow for 2016: $33 billion. Higher than 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

True. There are also much larger capital expenditures, and dividend payments.

I think Microsoft is doing tremendously well under Satya Nadella. I was making no other point except that the parent poster's comment about income were incorrect.

Low profits tend to happen in the first years of a transition to subscription. See Adobe for another example.

That risk will always be there. But it seems like he has built a culture that will allow it to continue onward. If you think about it, Bezos is not like Jobs, where the latter had an outsized impact on deciding what things Apple would or would not make.