As I explained elsewhere, Alphabet's moonshot investments are a different kind of investment than the what Amazon has been making for decades. But Amazon has been investing very heavily in changing the nature of buying stuff. To much grumbling from people who preferred profit.
15 years ago Bezos could have retired rich and turned it over to a standard CEO, who would have milked their then-excellent position commanding a large and growing share of ecommerce. And he would have been applauded by a lot of analysts, etc. But instead he's put titanic sums of money into making what are, at least on paper, pretty modest gains in terms of purchasing friction and latency. Is 2 days really that much better than 3-7 days? Is next-day and same-day really better still? The customers' answer is "fuck yes!" But it wasn't clear up front, at least to a lot of investors and commentators, that it was really worth tens of billions in capex.
In both cases, what I'm talking about here is investments that go beyond the time horizon of most companies. If you measure them by the average company (which has a much shorter exec and CEO tenure), of course they'll look bad.
15 years ago Bezos could have retired rich and turned it over to a standard CEO, who would have milked their then-excellent position commanding a large and growing share of ecommerce. And he would have been applauded by a lot of analysts, etc. But instead he's put titanic sums of money into making what are, at least on paper, pretty modest gains in terms of purchasing friction and latency. Is 2 days really that much better than 3-7 days? Is next-day and same-day really better still? The customers' answer is "fuck yes!" But it wasn't clear up front, at least to a lot of investors and commentators, that it was really worth tens of billions in capex.
In both cases, what I'm talking about here is investments that go beyond the time horizon of most companies. If you measure them by the average company (which has a much shorter exec and CEO tenure), of course they'll look bad.