Poor phrasing on my part. I mean decisions which weren't obviously correct beforehand.
I certainly didn't grok AWS for way too long.
And there was plenty of concern trolling about free shipping, eg "how long can they sustain this loss leader?!". Very long when you have free capital, certainly more than anyone else. It fortuitously parlayed into amazing customer retention and upselling. What Prof G (Scott Galloway) has coined the rundle (recurring revenue bundle). Proved so effective, in fact, that everyone's now doing subscriptions for everything.
Getting investors to give Bezos free money for being Bezos was actually pretty good for customers and got everyone free one-day shipping. Amazon is an investor charity like Uber, not a business.
Right now it is better for the customers, but that doesn't mean it will continue to be this. You assume that once/if Bezos crushes the rest of the competitors he won't start significantly increasing prices.
We saw something similar in the 90s where health care prices plummeted as the now winners developed and convinced the public that their monopolies were good. Now they are able increase prices by 15-20%/yr into the foreseeable future.
This is not a prediction (per se), but a statement that we should realize that monopolistic might be good for the consumer in the short term but bad in the long term.
There appear to be more competitors than ever to me. Amazon doesn't have much of a moat in their retail business (they do in AWS) since your lock in is only that you've bought Prime for the year; they're merely very good at it.
They do though. If one has paid for Prime, they might not even think about shopping elsewhere because they get Free n day shipping, for whatever value of n Amazon has nowadays.
