Except that every time they can, Amazon reduces their prices. Any investor who thinks that they will at some point increase margins doesn't listen to what Jeff Bezos says: we're good at running low margin businesses, and that's what we will continue to do.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of increasing your net income(which, at the end of the day, is what investors care about): Increase your margins by charging more or spending less, or increasing your revenue by servicing new markets. In either case, the end result for the investors in the same. In the first case, they get a bigger piece of the pie. In the second, the pie is bigger, which means that their percentage is worth more.
Amazon's entire business model is currently focused on growth through new markets. Here, the idea is that you spend money to make more money in the future. The problem, from an investment perspective, isn't that Amazon's been successful at doing that. Their revenue shows that they've been wildly so. The real problem is that their net income has not been increasing at all (http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/net_income ). Since their costs currently aren't scaling well with revenue, it might become a major issue in the future for Amazon's investors.
The market has given Bezos 15 years so far, and to his credit, he's done an outstanding job. Revenue growth has been pretty good for the company, and they're pretty stable. He's managed expectations better than just about any CEO out there, since he's completely open about how his plan is to spend money now to make more money in the future. The market has been fine with that, so far. But there will be a point where the investors will want their investment in Amazon to give a decent return. The question is when that's going to happen, and whether or not Amazon can get all their ducks in a row before it finally does.
I agree with what Bezos has been saying and doing, but the main gist of the argument against Amazon is that investors seem to be expecting Amazon to bump prices and margins at some point, completely the opposite of what Bezos has been saying and doing. Perhaps he means what he says, and simply wants to be like a grocery store making 1-2% margins. Now when your revenue is $100 billion a year, that's not a lot of meat to justify high P/E ratios. And just like Apple is experiencing now with having huge revenue rates, eventually your growth will have to taper off.
Part of preparation of this kind is merely getting comfortable with the idea of problem solving and coding in a high pressure environment, many otherwise excellent candidates eliminate themselves by choking at the whiteboard or collaborative editing tool. A day of serial technical interviews can be a brutal exercise that is very different from flow coding.
Every comment is also a liability, especially in light of the fact that the comment may, over time, drift away from the code. I sometimes wish I had an IDE that would color nearby comments red (and prevent commits) when code changes.
Which is to say, make comments where necessary, but own the liability, and strive to remove comments you find by making the code more obvious, just as you would strive to remove code to make it simpler.
Give up trying to measure people against some standard yardstick. It doesn't work in school, it doesn't work at work. People have a complex set of inter-relating competencies, and managing them is challenging work, not an exercise in stack ranking them by some index. Don't be lazy.
Earlier this year, I removed the clock from my toolbar. If I need to know the time, I can hit my iPad, or do a 'date' command in a terminal window. If I know that I have an impending appointment, I will run a clock app on the iPad.
I don't have a cell phone, and after I put my pocket watch through the laundry, I don't carry a watch either.
Unfortunately, as a software developer, pretty much every day is perforated with meetings, and as a bus commuter, I am locked to various schedules, so I can't quite go timeless.
This was hilarious for people who had booked tickets on flights out on the 30th. Do you leave on the 29th or the 31st...? This was a real problem for the airlines and headache for a number of travellers.
