When I first heard that, it just blew my mind. I think that's the philosophy that keeps Amazon moving upwards. At so many points in Amazon's history you can imagine the story ending, but 5 years later it turns out to have been just the beginning, just the introduction.
Successfully starting a bookstore wasn't the end, it was day1 for a music store. The music store wasn't the end, it was day1 for a retail store. Retail was day1 for digital downloads. Downloads were day1 for Kindle. Prime, AWS, India, Android, Same day delivery, groceries...
When you tell yourself the story of your business, you probably start with the idea, go through the struggle, and end with your current success. Bezos puts all of that in the first paragraph, and then tries to imagine the rest of the book.
"It's always day one."
Also, though they're generally considered successes now, I recall no shortage of naysayers trying to claim the Kindle, Prime and AWS as failures.
0: http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/livingsocial-confirms-175-m...
However, my next question is: What can we do to make more companies be like Amazon?
Not every business needs to operate on razor thin margins, but I'd love to see more big companies playing the long game and continuously innovating. Wall Street invests in returns, not innovation. What can be done to help reset that balance a bit?
Not to mention that when the endgame is "own the entire retail sector," even if other companies want to be like Amazon, in the end they'd have to kill Amazon to do it. Owning the entire retail sector is incompatible with the existence of lots of thriving alternatives. It's like the Highlander -- there can be only one.
It always helps to compete on different terms than your competitors and incumbents.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-allentown-amazon-complain...
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/668688/is_amazo...
http://blog.seattlepi.com/trevorgriffey/2011/04/03/top-10-re...
my gf is the one who has been telling me about amazon and their labor practices. she tells me about jeff not giving back to the community (she is from seattle), tax issues, labor issues. i'm not educated on the whole ordeeal but she has def sparked my interest. does anyone have any feedback? is amazon different from any other warehouse job?
i used to work at UPS and a document storage company a while back and i don't remember it being terrible on either accounts.
And of course encourage changes towards long term investment, maybe using the tax code.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/earnings/e...
Amazon just happens to be the only company which the investor collective allows to actually compete, something which otherwise doesn't happen unless a company is at risk of failing.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2012/03/26/will-...
-0.20. Negative 0.20.
Investors lump AMZN with GOOG and the like but GOOG's EPS is 33.59. TGT? 4.26. Walmart is 5.07.
No other company with a market cap (100+Bn) as large as AMZN is allowed to get away with that. The only one that comes close is Vodafone, with a tiny positive EPS (0.13).
It's important to note that if any other company spent until their EPS was negative, investors would flip.
Amazon is playing with razor thin margins while trying to scale up a platform to end all platoforms that we might someday use for everything without thinking about it. On that day/year/eon dollar bills might as well be printed with Jeff Bezos' face on them.
Amazon won't be using UPS and Fedex trucks on that day. They'll be using Amazon trucks. You'll know that era when you see it, I think.
If you're Walmart or Target its hard to justify it at this point, the stock could take a major dive from such a risk. They're at the "Ask-questions" phase, and the questions are always "What's the profit?" because these are publicly traded companies. Amazon has been playing it risky since the get-go.
Bezos is in for a very long gamble, and that frustrates the hell out of some investors, but its lofty enough to still attract investment dollars while in the "build-first" stage. Hopefully they can pull it off for a few more years before the stock market shifts to "Ask-questions."
So that's why. Amazon is doing something bold that would cause the mother of all stock dives in any other 100+Bn company. They get a free pass because Bezos is convincing and for Amazon its sort-of-always-been-this-way. Walmart/Target/Etc do not have either of those luxuries - the incredible (or believable) visionary and being a company that's still in burn (build) mode.