zlacker

>>mdp202+(OP)
Amazon is not a secret weapon, poison pill maybe?

This is a company that is actively shooting itself in the foot on all fronts and by the time they realize it’s gone too far they won’t be able to turn the ship fast enough.

>>Action+qY1
People desperately want Amazon to be failing but it just isn't. They made 30 billion in profit in 2023. The rumors of Amazon's demise are greatly exaggerated.

>>BadHum+x02
It’s not that people are wanting them to fail, just that they are being so anti everything whilst their competitors amass.

I’ve got friends who’ve moved from AWS-centric roles to Azure-centric, prime is a dead product walking, twitch is unprofitable, Alexa is dead, and their original business is squeezing users, drivers, and employees. A strong viable Amazon.com alternative and they are done.

>>Action+X82
Sure, a store where you can buy literally everything and have it delivered in days, and they're done.

>>amadeu+xb2
How'd that work out for the Sears Catalog?

>>DrillS+Cg2
Sears was destroyed by standard corporate raider tactics. I don't think that they serve as the example that you may think they do.

>>ssl-3+Rq2
I remember my last time walking into a Sears. I figured I'd give it a shot to see if they had anything different than HD/Lowes in the category I was looking at (shop vac attachments). A clerk pointed me to a computer saying "If we don't have it in the store you can order it from our catalog". The computer catalog was literally just searching Amazon listings. That basically confirmed to me that Sears was in a death spiral.

>>mindsl+1u2
Yep. They were already dead by that point (again, due to standard corporate raider tactics) -- a zombie just awaiting its coup de grâce.

There was a time before that when they had a better web presence for selling regular hardgoods than Amazon (which was still mostly known as just an online book store), and the Sears Parts website was the very first place to look online for manuals, diagrams, parts, and standard accessories for any random household thing (including shop vac attachments).

They also co-founded the Prodigy network back in the 80s when home computers were still very novel and people weren't broadly sure if the concept would ever catch on.