This is an interesting article, but I'd like to bring some attention to a bit of relevant history. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dalzell https://en.w

This is an interesting article, but I'd like to bring some attention to a bit of relevant history. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dalzell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dalzell "Prior to joining Amazon.com in 1997, Dalzell was vice president of information systems at Wal-Mart starting in 1990. At Walmart he developed their datawarehouse strategy from the ground up, giving their suppliers direct access to demographic sales information." https://www.cnet.com/news/wal-mart-sues-amazon-others/ https://www.cnet.com/news/wal-mart-sues-amazon-others/ "Then, in July, Amazon hired Jimmy Wright as vice president and chief logistics officer. Wright worked for Wal-Mart for 13 years, serving as a "key logistics leader," according to Amazon. Observers say Wal-Mart, one of the world's largest retailers, prides itself on its computerized supply chain and retail management system and is aggressive in protecting it. " I was working in WalMart Information Systems Division at the time, and Dalzell's exit, along with some others, was a Big Deal. We had meetings about it. At the time, I and pretty much all of my peers thought the internal reaction was kind of absurd. WalMart was, in the late 1990s, ascendant in many ways, and Amazon was just some 'west coast dot com selling CDs and books in the mail'. Funny story: in 1997, we were deploying routers to over 2000 WalMart stores worldwide, and they were made by a company called "Advanced Computer Communications". We didn't switch over to Cisco routers for a couple of years, because the ACC routers properly supported SNA protocol encapsulation and Cisco didn't. Anyway, the name of the ACC routers we were buying was 'Amazon', which, I was told later, momentarily caused some panic and confusion in senior leadership.