Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.
IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it.
Disclaimer: I work for AMZN
It's so fascinating how diverse people's viewpoints are! My first experience of IKEA was that it was a confusing, frustrating, poorly laid out and inefficient labyrinth designed to get you lost, and also funnel you to the "hot dog" items that make them the majority of their profit. I've taken many of my parents and observed similarly people's parents and grandparents of friends get just as frustrated and confused at the layout. For god sakes, I just want to be able to walk in, go to the "kitchen decor" get what I need, and walk out. I don't want an "experience", but I digress.
IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted with resounding "yes".
On the other hand, I have all Ikea furniture and it's survived 3-4 moves and only gotten stronger - my last mover's hobby was repairing furniture and he fixed everything with his pile of spare parts.
I use it for some small businesses of mine but I wouldn't use it for a medium company. I would just get some servers from smaller provider in different data centers and deploy whatever I need.
AWS, was definitely the service that convinced everyone they needed the cloud. Most of the companies I've seen move to aws are just wasting money, don't need the scalability and are massively over-provisioned.
A few unicorns needs the cloud's powers to scale massively now - and, given how much it costs, they'll end up rewriting it anyway to save hundreds of millions a few years down the line.
That said, AWS is solid and best in class in many areas, and to paraphrase the old saying: "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS"
Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.
End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest.
Employee headcount, is more or less better?
Things always seem rosier.
??
Sorry but Amazon has far, far more than 12M SKUs.
Comparing online shopping revenue to social media revenue kind of feels like comparing apples to oranges to me.
Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.
In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.
I'll add 90% was hyperbole.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90% workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.
> someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team
Customers don't care all that much why AWS "works". They care that it "works". And, again, it "working" is not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another means to an end.
You don't have any of that at Amazon, there is firefighting instead of research, they aren't running out people willing to work for them yet, and personnel turnover is stratospheric.
Yes, they do make money, but you can't buy advancement.