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Since then, Amazon kept growing and eating other markets (see AWS), or failing to eat markets (see Alexa) while still producing a shitton of money to finance al
by troupo 1y ago
Since then, Amazon kept growing and eating other markets (see AWS), or failing to eat markets (see Alexa) while still producing a shitton of money to finance all of that.
However, most of the rest of the industry simply collectively decided that profits don't matter. Most companies of past 10-15 years stopped caring about profits, and only talk about revenue. The are now only two goals in mind:
- survive long enough on unlimited investor money to be sold to the highest bidder and be immediately shutdown
- survive long enough on unlimited investor money to try and corner a market through investor-subdidized price dumping and near-illegal business practices, and then maybe look at how to get some of the lost money back, maybe
- axus 1y agoGet bought by IBM, Oracle, or Broadcom, and let them be the villains.
- teddyh 1y agoOnce the exit is finalized, who cares about the customers? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.
- criemen 1y agoThanks for the reminder! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
- masfuerte 1y agoYou may not be aware that Tom Lehrer has released all his songs into the public domain: https://tomlehrersongs.com/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/ https://tomlehrersongs.com/wernher-von-braun/
- Animats 1y ago"Profits don't matter" only worked during the period of zero interest rates. AMZN started to become profitable in 2021.[1] By 2023, it was very profitable. $17 billion in Q1 2025. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in...
- vineyardmike 1y agoCable companies and other infrastructure companies have been focusing on free cash flow and revenue over profit for generations. Interest rates have fluctuated a lot in that time. Amazon started to be very profitable because they couldn’t reinvest all that money into growing the business in a meaningful way. The timing aligning with when they stopped their Covid-buildout because sales behavior returned to in-store, they started scaling back the billions a year they wasted on Alexa, and started scaling back various moonshot ideas like Amazon Go stores.
- jongjong 1y agoIt's weird because revenue can easily be gamed. I could set up a shell company and quickly sell expensive goods back and forth between the two companies and achieve any revenue number I want. Profits are much harder to fake however, especially in the long run.