Jeff Bezos' latest letter to Amazon shareholders quotes me, sadly leaving off the name:
One of the rules of asymmetric warfare is if you have an adverary willing to die for their cause you have to kill them in the most gruesome way possible.Don't get me wrong. I don't mean this as a criticism of Amazon. I think Amazon is one of the greatest companies in the world if not the greatest company, precisely for this reason. It's also the most terrifying competitor in the world....MOREOur heavy investments in Prime, AWS, Kindle, digital media, and customer experience in general strike some as too generous, shareholder indifferent, or even at odds with being a for-profit company. “Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” writes one outside observer. But I don’t think so. To me, trying to dole out improvements in a just-in-time fashion would be too clever by half. It would be risky in a world as fast-moving as the one we all live in. More fundamentally, I think long-term thinking squares the circle. Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas. Take a long-term view, and the interests of customers and shareholders align.
What that means for WalMart, Best Buy and Barnes & Noble, I'm not sure.
