It's honestly because of Jeff Bezos that Amazon can succeed without Jeff Bezos.
People honestly do not give Bezos enough credit, not just for what Amazon has achieved, but for what he has achieved within Amazon. Decades from now there will be case studies about the succession planning at Amazon versus other "major" companies of our time which oftentimes revolve around the ego and narcissism of a CEO with too much self-importance to foster any sort of succession within the organization.
Amazon's best years are quite likely still not behind us and will quite likely happen when Bezos is no longer around to see them.
The ability to look long term at Amazon is just fucking amazing.
Google will never ever have that kind of competence.
if I flip it to landscape, the layout looks right, but the button to reveal the search bar (the most important element on a retail homepage) doesn't work. I would be shocked to have that experience with Amazon in the middle of the holidays. it's just throwing away money.
They're caught up exactly because your biggest problem is that the site layout shit the bed. Your complaint wasn't that their business model and logistical infrastructure doesn't let you order stuff to your home on par with amazon.
when you have strong competition, it's not enough to mostly get things right at a high level. the little things matter just as much for earning trust. Amazon gets this. Walmart, apparently, does not. they're a solid second choice if something is sold out elsewhere, I'll give them that.
As an aside, I would love to read a biography of Bezos the individual, not businessman. We all too often shrink the complex lives of humans into labels that fit 280 characters. Alas, that'll likely not happen anytime soon.
(You can listen to the article thanks to the YC-backed Audm. Great content, passable app)
[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-je...
There is clearly a spectrum here and blindly labelling all government as useless is wrong.
They refer to the fact that taxes is the pot the government will draw money from whenever any of their enterprises becomes unprofitable. If the pot is too small to fund all the projects they can simply grow out by taxing the populace more.
When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
Tax collection is part of government and in this case is an useful counterexample to the endless "all government is bad" messages we regularly hear on HN.
>When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
Yes, and unpopular governments get voted out (assuming they are democratic).
> doesn't pay taxes
Yes, that's what R&D investment is. They "make" billions but reinvest all of it into growth so they pay no tax. If you somehow split off AWS and taxed its profits separately Amazon would just increase its R&D spending on AWS and go back to paying $0 in tax.
This is a good policy, by the way. You want to encourage companies to make use of their money rather than returning it to shareholders. That creates more jobs and results in more technological and economic growth.
I took every write off I could last year to minimize my tax burden. Am I also a bad person?
I can actually respect Amazon. They reinvest a huge chunk of the change into new business verticals and create new jobs.
Let’s say Amazon paid another $N billion in taxes. Where would the money go? To Washington politicians who’ve been promising change and reform in education, infrastructure, healthcare - at least my entire existence on this planet of not longer. Why should we give them money? Who holds them accountable, and regardless of your politics, how well has that worked out? Americas politicians optimize for their reelection. None of them, not the career officials or the one or two term presidents, regardless of political party, have done much to optimize for the marathon.
Bezos was apparently going to go bankrupt and Amazons model just wasn’t sustainable - according to the same media that cheerleads the two political parties. Yet, here we are, and the failed politicians and divisive media has no ideas other than blaming successful companies.
You could take every penny of Amazon and Apples total market cap and hand it to Washington and state governments. You believe anything will change and will stop overspending every year and adding to the national debt? Who will politicians blame then? Tesla? Ha!
Sure, individuals and companies can use the rules of the system to minimize the tax they're paying. Everyone does that. But companies like Amazon also have a responsibility to the country they operate in and in my opinion should pay taxes there. Just because some financial wizard figured out that that there is such a thing as a double dutch sandwich or what it's called doesn't mean everyone has to eat it.
In my opinion anything larger than a medium sized city (think one of the many cities in SoCal) is basically guaranteed to use its funds poorly.
Do individuals and companies not?
You are talking out of your ass and revealing your xenophobia. The Dutch Sandwich tax dodge works mostly for firms who can pretend that Caribbean post box firm own their "intellectual property" (i.e. tech and pharma firms) and who can then pretend that their actual operating entities are loss making. And no, the German car and industrial companies don't do that.
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/steuern/fiskus-geht-leer-aus-m...
I couldn't find a source for Siemens et all that quickly, they are doing it as well so. As is any other DAX listed company (that isn't loosing money).
I think a large portion of the American population would be surprised how often men piss in plastic bottles, and it just goes unmentioned.
The Manhatten Project, the New Deal, and the Space Race were remarkably efficient and productive, back in the time that we believed that governments can and should do things, and politicians worked together in good faith.
Then corporate lobbyists bought our politicians and convinced us that governments are evil and inept, and that they shouldn't have to pay taxes because the government will just waste it. So we deregulated everything, and now billionares just waste their record profits on low orbit joyrides instead, while average Americans die preventable deaths because they can't afford healthcare (which the governments of every other developed nation manage to provide their citizens for free).
Color me completely impressed.