"By carving out an operational piece of the company as a platform, they could future-proof the company against inefficiency and technological stagnation." This

"By carving out an operational piece of the company as a platform, they could future-proof the company against inefficiency and technological stagnation." This sums it up for me. The computing platform is the foundation of Amazon's survival. Get that right and then make it unassailable, and world domination is inevitable. In some ways, Microsoft used the same approach by separating the operating system from applications and letting each application compete on it's own. They quickly found ways to team those applications for advantage. Amazon has the computing platform dominance, the consumer behavior data at massive scale, the delivery platform (they're buying ships?), ... they're not just after Retail, but anything that touches customer experience. FedEx is in the cross-hairs...