The companies that remind me most of Amazon are General Electric and Honda. Amazon started with a single complex offering (centralized eCommerce) and from that

The companies that remind me most of Amazon are General Electric and Honda. Amazon started with a single complex offering (centralized eCommerce) and from that they famously abstracted and platformized everything about their business: they decentralized their marketplace, they dogfooded their web services to the point that they were able to actually sell their web services, they relentlessly keep decoupling their core. Honda, and General Electric, too started out with pretty simple value propositions. Honda started by selling piston rings to Toyota, and from there started manufacturing car part after car part until they had enough to create the cars themselves. (And it turned out that when you can manufacture a car yourself from start to finish, you can manufacture a lot of other stuff with the same goods, from drills to radios). On the other end of the spectrum, General Electric expanded by maintaining otherwise orthogonal SBUs and becoming one of the first companies in the 20th century to really take advantage of cross-branding, figuring out that if a customer liked their lightbulb they'd be okay with using the same company to buy a handheld radio. (Incidentally, both GE and Honda also profited tremendously from WWII. I hope no tech company happens to profit tremendously from a WWIII, mainly because I hope there is no WWIII.)