Possible some day many may see that the king has no clothes.
JT
Why? In one of my previous lives I was a management consultant. One of the techniques I use to select investment opportunities is to evaluate the business model to see if I understand it and to see if it makes sense. Amazon is no longer a pure retailer, it has become a conglomerate by investing the cash flow into new ventures. The distinguishing feature is that they all seem to fit together synergistically.
Bezos starts with an online bookstore.
From books they expand to varied consumer products.
When they improve warehousing with robots, they buy the robot company.
When they expand their cloud usage they offer cloud computing.
When delivery grows significantly they play with drones and shipping services.
The old style (19th century) business model was vertical integration. As processes required more brain power than brawn vertical integration gave way to horizontal value chains, a model used very successfully by Dell, for example, relying on technologies like just in time inventory. Conglomeration like Litton and ITT were doing fell by the wayside. Even GE is shedding some of its components. But Buffett and Bezos have been very successful at conglomeration because their methods match their business model which is not crass empire building.
Denny Schlesinger
We might see Amazon developing their own ARM based server chips one of these days…