It’s pretty clear where Amazon is headed: 1) Take over the retail and
media sectors, globally; and 2) Replace the delivery of all these
products (goodbye UPS, FedEx, and DHL) with its own planes, drones,
and autonomous vehicles. Sure, they’ll continue to hit speed bumps.
However, their culture of innovation and access to infinite capital will
roll right over them. Does anyone believe that any country (except
perhaps China, protecting its own online retailer Alibaba) can resist?
As Paul Newman explained in The Sting, the key to a great con is
that the victim never realizes he was conned—indeed, he believes he is
about to be a big winner right up until the last moment. Newspapers
still feel that the future happened to them versus what really
happened: they were Googled, hard. And where Google didn’t molest
them, their own stupidity—not buying eBay when it was offered to
them on a silver platter, not snapping up Craigslist when it was still a
start-up, and keeping their top talent on the print side instead of
moving them to the web—doomed them. Had they made the right
decision on just half of the opportunities presented to them by
cyberspace, most would still be around.
The rest of the Four have similarly pulled the wool over the eyes of
their victims. Brands eagerly pumped money into building Facebook
communities before realizing they weren’t their own. Sellers are quick
to join Amazon, believing the platform provides them access to a new
swath of customers, but then find themselves in competition with
Amazon itself. Even Xerox thought it was getting a lucrative piece
(100,000 shares) of Apple, one of the world’s hottest tech companies,
for simply letting Steve Jobs look behind “its kimono.”^12 You could say
these wounds were self-inflicted.
Aspirational horsemen always show a willingness to go to market
in ways unavailable to their old-guard competition. Uber, for example,
operates in blatant contravention of the law in many, perhaps just
about all, of its markets. It has been banned in Germany; Uber drivers
are fined in France (but Uber pays the fines);^13 and various U.S.
jurisdictions have ordered Uber to cease operations.^14 And yet,
investors—including governments—are lining up to hand the company
billions. Why? Because they sense that, in the end, the law will give
way before Uber does; Uber is inevitable. And they are probably right.