Could be in the horror section …

It’s not the best researched book, some key info is left out like how Besos pays almost no personal tax - far less than you and I, but the book still an interesting read.

The author is in Love with Besos, he tries to give both sides of the argument but it’s still highly slanted.

The author explains that Amazon’s strategy is to invest massively in a sector they don’t understand, and is willing to loose money for years until the competition can’t keep up. They were subsidised by UPS for delivery, food stamps for their employees etc for their first decade or so. Items were and are often sold at a loss. So items are cheap but the tax payer subsidised every item sold, oh and in the US they mostly didn’t pay sales tax for years. The Besos economic strategy is to rely on the stock market for working capital while you weed out all competitors and then attracting short term market place sellers while you steal their data and employees / delivery whom eventually they will eventually replace with Robots.

Some scary stories about Amazon competing with their market sellers, who then borrow money directly from Amazon to try to get economies of scale to survive and then Amazon cut their credit line once they have own branded the product hence removing the partner / now competitor from the equation. The Seller in the story lost everything they had earned over years, Amazon added some more numbers (at a loss most likely) to their top line. Wonder why the seller couldn’t compete? The book tells that Amazon offer Chinese sellers cheaper shipping to their us ment centres than the US sellers using their service (in exchange for knowing which factory to collect from incase they want to use the data to cut out the seller).

At times the book feels like the writer had a word number target so did a find / replace to include the word “fly wheel” everywhere unnecessarily. It’s annoying.

Overall being a retail entrepreneur in a world of Amazon is far more risky, but thereare opportunities. If you have a business that Amazon can compete with, consider Pivoting now or make a strategy of being the seller of second choice (ie raise your prices and provide better service and hope some of the customers will appreciate that enough not to take the advice and then not being willing to pay enough to cover the advice givers wages).

Saying that the book makes you feel buying from Amazon makes sense as buying from another company means your are paying more as they will be subject to more taxes - so you are opting to contribute more tax and to pay more. If they are willing to sell at a loss, your gain right? For now. And what person living on the normal (taxed) average wage thinks with Besos economics, if Amazon spend more than they make for a decade they go up in value and have an end game in mind, if a person does it their house is repossessed and their end game is homelessness and working in an Amazon fulfilment chain.

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The industry standard for all future business!

Adapt to Bezonomics or get crushed. A must read for anyone considering business. A great peek into the future, which is closer than we think.

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Insightful to a degree

Good content and easy to follow but a fair amount of thematic repetition with some areas.

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Great book about Amazon.

Interesting and easy to digest. Amazon is currently the company to follow if any.

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A true eye opener

If you have the slightest interest in the changes that have occurred in the last 20 years, this book is a real insight. It’s not just about Amazon.

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if I hear "AI flywheel" once more I'll scream

This is a fair, but not outstanding, business book. interesting, and week researched, although doesn't really tell you anything that you don't already know or couldn't guess. there are some chapters of the Amazon story - such as the famous "API memo" - that aren't mentioned but which, I think, offer more profound insights into the Amazon phenomenon than anything presented here. And enough already of the "AI flywheel". This is hardly a differentiating factor, these days, for just Amazon. While the author makes periodic attempts to inject balance it does come across largely as a Bezos hagiography.

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6 people found this helpful

Drink every time you hear "flywheel"

Enjoyed thoroughly, kept my interest from beginning to the end. For someone whose English is second language, the narrator was very easy to understand. Amazon is a fascinating company and so is its leader.

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2 people found this helpful

The smartest company the world has ever seen?

There have been several books written about the incredible story of how the son of an estranged trick uni-cyclist father and seventeen year old mother founded Amazon and became the world's richest man. Such is the pace of change at Amazon that many of them become out of date very quickly. This book by Fortune associate editor Brian Dumaine treads familiar ground but also manages to articulate the concept of the virtual circle "AI Flywheel" that has turned Amazon into such a dominating power by using algorithms to suggest products by learning from customer buying habits. Jeff Bezos is certainly a patient man and his forward and long term planning with seemingly little regard for short term shareholder expectations has allowed the Amazon Empire to expand and diversify from an online bookseller into now stocking over 600 million items, eReaders, voice recognition devices such as Echo/Alexa, TV and music streaming services and other areas such as cloud computing through its AWS business, ownership of the Washington Post and even brick and mortar retail. Advertising and healthcare are the next targets for Mr Bezos followed by space exploration through the advanced Blue Origin porgram.

Not all ventures have been successful though such as Amazon's for example the company's foray into smart phones via its Fire Phones was a disaster. Generally though, when Mr Bezos decides to go for something he does it big time, providing the six page proposal is comprehensive, and he has room to fail too which lets him take more risks.

Amazon is not without its critics though and there are examples quoted here of staff working in fulfillment centres with less than fulfilling jobs and well documented attacks on the empire from Bernie Sanders and others. There is a threat that Amazon could well become too powerful and suffer a similar fate to those early US business magnates Rockefeller and Mellon whose empires were broken up by Roosevelt's anti-trust legislation at the beginning of the last century. Generally, Mr Dumaine is decidedly pro-Amazon and considers that any criticism on Amazon is an attack on free market capitalism. Maybe Amazon really is the smartest company the world has ever seen.

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1 person found this helpful

Business masterclass in a nutshell

I really enjoyed this book. The naration was clear and engaging also.

Ive had several businesses over the years and we have just had to start selling online and encorporate a fast delivery service.

I got alot of ideas from reading this book which I have no doubt will prove very useful to me.

I also found Bezos as a subject hugely motivational and inspiring.

Anybody interested in business would benifit from listening to this audio book.

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Interesting hagiography

Yes it was worth my time, yes it was interesting, yes, it was very flattering of Jeff (and why not?).

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