This article is talking at the wrong level about Amazon. They're not an ecommerce company anymore. They're an infrastructure provider that cannibalises its ecos

This article is talking at the wrong level about Amazon. They're not an ecommerce company anymore. They're an infrastructure provider that cannibalises its ecosystem just slowly enough that nobody panics. Start a business, run it on AWS, do well, they have all your systems metadata and using that can replicate your business. Rinse, repeat. Then there's Lambda and Greengrass... ha We're the Eloi, AWS are the Morlocks. You can't beat the Morlocks with a 'community' play, and the only way 'going niche' will help you is that you'll be too small to pay attention to. [Edit] To make my comment less negative... To beat Amazon you need to get ahead of them on a game they don't already own (or have the capacity to catch up on) and establish yourself as the dominant market in that space. E.g. there's an interesting company in London calle Synthace for example who are building a compiler for pharmacueticals. You write code that defines a manufacturing process and it makes the drugs for you. If they can provide commoditised pharma-as-a-service and evolve a healthy enough ecosystem to build up some value, Amazon will find it hard to replicate and either try to acquire or hunt elsewhere. Yeah it's a bleak view. It's not going to change either because China's ascendance will mean Amazon is the US's strongest buffer against Alibaba, so unlikely to get broken up even it achieves monopoly position.