OPINION
AMAZON GLOBAL VIEW
WHAT’S AMAZON UP TO NOW? HARDLY A WEEK GOES BY WITHOUT AMAZON UNVEILING ANOTHER POTENTIALLY GAME-CHANGING CONCEPT AND THIS WEEK IS NO DIFFERENT WITH THE OPENING OF ITS FIRST AMAZON FRESH STORE. BY ANTONY BEGLEY
A
t one point in time, Amazon was really only a threat to the major retailers, who quickly became aware of its all too obvious encroachment into grocery. There’s hardly a week goes by without a new concept or initiative being unfurled, usually with a minimum of fuss. One of the things that is so threatening about Amazon is its clear willingness to tackle big, complex and very expensive challenges, many of which are set to fail. Boss Jeff Bezos has said as much – but with the deepest pockets on the planet, Bezos is willing to risk as many enormous-scale failures as is required to unearth the gems that have grown the business into the behemoth it is today. That apparently swashbuckling approach is something that very few companies are prepared to compete with and it’s
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something that causes massive consternation in boardrooms everywhere, including among fellow global giants like Microsoft and Apple. The other key belief that sits at the heart of everything Amazon does is that the customer comes first. Every business says it, most businesses mean it, but Amazon delivers on it. Nothing matters more than the customer – and that includes the Amazon bottom line. That partially explains the company’s seemingly gung-ho approach to embracing multibillion dollar failures. Being an entirely data-driven company, however, Amazon makes every decision based on numbers. Algorithms, if you like. And while many believe that the ‘computer says’ model necessarily results in a loss of human empathy and missed opportunity, it’s hard to argue that the model isn’t working.
