Amazon is a logistics beast - A detailed teardown

So why is Amazon so good in virtually every industry it gets into? The answer: Amazon isn’t a tech company or a cloud company or a diapers or books or healthcare company. It’s an infrastructure company.[1452] Amazon’s decades of success in e-commerce has led it to build up hundreds of strategically-placed warehouses,[1453] titanic distribution cent

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We want to make global logistics as reliable as the electrical grid. When you flip a light switch, you just get power. You take it for granted. But what's actually happening is an incredibly complex coordination where a power plant somewhere in the world is getting slightly hotter just to provide you that extra dose of electricity that you need. It... See more

Such speed and convenience is difficult to achieve when your business model is at the mercy of third party merchants fulfilling your orders. These companies must therefore be vertically integrated with a high degree of control over their Dark Stores and courier networks.

Almost no logistics companies can show you where your freight is in real-time on a map. Most data is exchanged in unstructured email messages with attachments. There are almost no logistics APIs to speak of. The pandemic has dramatically amplified two major trends in supply chains: the rise of e-commerce and the diversification of global supply and... See more

In both cases, Amazon looked beyond the function to the form. The function of Whole Foods stores was to sell groceries, but the stores took the form of a massive real estate footprint with storage and refrigeration that could be repurposed for distribution. The function of Amazon’s computing infrastructure was for internal support, but its form—a m

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