You Buy a Newspaper, and Then You Read This: Will the Bezos Bulldozer Change Direction?
April 27, 2021
Jeff Bezos (via assorted financial entities) gained control of the Washington Post. MBAs can quibble about “gained control”, the idea of buying a newspaper, and associating the publication with the mom-and-pop online store. That’s okay.
Navigate to “How Big Tech Got So Big: Hundreds of Acquisitions.” Now visualize yourself as the world’s richest man and an individual who may be the smartest person in any room into which he wanders. Then read this passage from your newspaper:
You may have recognized many of these acquired companies, like Zappos, IMDb, Twitch and Goodreads — all owned by Amazon.
Skip a few lines:
But the majority of acquisitions involved small start-ups with
valuable patents or talented engineers…
And this passage:
But now, as the tech giants grow more powerful, critics who accused these companies of using monopoly power to weaken competitors have also called for more scrutiny, saying the acquisitions are not rooted in innovation but total market control — part of a tactic known as “copy, acquire, kill” — to eliminate competition…
Continuing with:
To enter the grocery arena, the company acquired Whole Foods Market and its distribution channels and retail locations in one $13.7 billion-dollar gulp. Amazon wanted to be a bigger player in the “Internet of Things,” so it swallowed up several home security companies and the home router company Eero. And as the company dived into the autonomous vehicle industry, it chose start-ups in that space, too. [Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.] Amazon is everywhere: in your television with Prime Video, in your ears with its Echo smart speaker, and behind the websites and apps you use every day. In 2020, the company made $386 billion in revenue. The company shows no signs of slowing, with additional acquisitions that included robotics companies to assist workers and artificial intelligence to grow the capabilities of its Alexa virtual assistant service. Amazon executives have said the company is just a small part of the overall retail industry.
In your hypothetical guise of the world’s richest person, what do you do?
[a] Ignore
[b] Make a call to someone who can talk to someone about the story
[c] Pull a lever on the bulldozer and change direction
[d] Other? Explain: _______________________________
Business strategies with examples from one’s employer can be interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2021
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