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Notes -
Apparently it's one of the very few commodity products on there that actually has any margin. If this is true, I'll expect Amazon to eventually displace the competition, they are very experienced in the practice...
Then there's the publishing, their on demand book printing, the ebook business. And Amazon is highly vertically integrated even outside of those two, though. The data centers, the software in them, the warehouses, the trucks, ect. The market cannot offer them a competing product on any of those, although they are essentially commodities that other, similar business still get on the market.
Apple is similar. They use contractors on the low margin stuff and the things they absolutely cannot do themselves (SOTA chip fab), but keep the rest of the value add for themselves, and use the additional control that gets them to deliver a superior product directly to their own stores.
I don't understand Netflix either, but that might just be taste. Apparently their slop gets views - obligatory views at that, keeping their audience captive - and thus makes money. Make they are just lying about their metrics. But that would probably be fraud, I don't know. Maybe the average normie really forgets what he's subscribed to.
I know the idea is old, it's the only attack on efficient markets that makes sense. And there were vertically integrated business empires before, but never this many, this successful and seemingly this necessary to compete on product.
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