Wal-Mart and Amazon are not really in the same industry. Wal-Mart is an old retailer with a lot of physical stores and a well-established business model. Amaz

Wal-Mart and Amazon are not really in the same industry. Wal-Mart is an old retailer with a lot of physical stores and a well-established business model. Amazon is a young software company with the world’s biggest Internet store, the world’s biggest computer apparatus, and a bunch of other things I probably don’t even know about. But it’s the software thing that’s the important bit. Software is intelligence, intelligence is efficiency, and Amazon is software first. In any “old” industry it wants to enter, it becomes, by default, the smartest competitor therein. It will start out with better logistics than the incumbent industry experts with decades of experience. It’s like Amazon has a 20-point IQ advantage in anything it wants to do. Or more. A scary competitor. Scarier than anything from the Robber Baron era.