3 ms·

One option is to divide AMZ along business units. Thats the natural, easy way to do so. Itd cause least loss of value to the shareholders. I disagree. AMZ babi

One option is to divide AMZ along business units. Thats the natural, easy way to do so. Itd cause least loss of value to the shareholders. I disagree. AMZ babies would still be essentially monopolistic in their markets. Nor do I think shareholder value, after being inflated through monopolistic abuse, is sacrisanct. Divide AMZ slicing through the business units. Make a half dozen vertically integrated baby AMZs. They all have access to AMZ IP, held by a separate company that can license it out to third parties (ie if they don't license their web tech to, say, Best Buy this AMZ baby has no revenue and goes to receivership since all other AMZ babies don't have to pay licensing fees). EDIT: I almost forgot liability. Transfer all current known and unknown AMZ liabilities, including fraud and sale of fake goods, to the baby AMZs.

theptip 3y ago
I’m suspicious, I think most people underestimate how hard it would be to split companies. If you have everyone in the company go dig holes for 24 months, the stock price would tank and much value would be destroyed. Likewise splitting is a massive effort that amounts to burning resources that wouldn’t otherwise be spent. Now part of the point is to destroy the monopoly, which reduces company value too. This is a subtle point; we are probably ok with this because implicitly this is profit extracted as rent and which should really go to competitors. We’d probably say the value here is being redistributed. But the monopoly rent is different from the actual OpEx and CapEx required to restructure. I really want to see even a rough quantitative analysis here before making any commitments. The approach you put forth here seems maximally complex and inefficient as an end state, FWIW. Shared access is going to be a nightmare to operationalize. Much better to cut at existing business unit org boundaries.

theptip 3y ago

I’m suspicious, I think most people underestimate how hard it would be to split companies. If you have everyone in the company go dig holes for 24 months, the stock price would tank and much value would be destroyed. Likewise splitting is a massive effort that amounts to burning resources that wouldn’t otherwise be spent. Now part of the point is to destroy the monopoly, which reduces company value too. This is a subtle point; we are probably ok with this because implicitly this is profit extracted as rent and which should really go to competitors. We’d probably say the value here is being redistributed. But the monopoly rent is different from the actual OpEx and CapEx required to restructure. I really want to see even a rough quantitative analysis here before making any commitments. The approach you put forth here seems maximally complex and inefficient as an end state, FWIW. Shared access is going to be a nightmare to operationalize. Much better to cut at existing business unit org boundaries.