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Check out these Amazon acquisitions:

* Woot (leading deal of the day site)

* Stanza (leading e-reader)

* Zappos (leading shoe retailer)

* dpreview.com (leading camera review site)

* AbeBooks (leading used book marketplace)

* Audible (leading audio book seller)

* BuyVIP (group purchasing)

* Amie Street (online music)

There model seems to be to try to compete with a home-grown offering, and if it doesn't work, buy the competitor with their cash.




But being a leading retailer doesn't make you great. Zappos I believe had razor thin margins that really left little room for error.


Amazon is accustomed to operating at razor thin margins. It's one of the advantages they believe they have in the cloud computing business compared to Microsoft and Google.


Buy revenue, then worry about profits.




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