Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

For instance, consider the MVP of the online shoe seller Zappos. The founders took photos of shoes at local stores and posted them on a website — and whenever someone “purchased” a shoe, the founders would buy the shoe from the store and mail it to them.[1490] An MVP is just a simple, early version of an app to see if people like the idea.

Meanwhile, even the mighty Walmart needs to spend $37 million to open a new store.[1460]

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]

Put this together and you can envision a future where Alexa notices you’re sick, Amazon mails you a health test kit, you send it back, a virtual doctor prescribes medication, and PillPack mails you the pills.[1449]

So it wasn’t all that surprising when Amazon aggressively entered the grocery market by buying Whole Foods in 2017 — which made the grocery chain Kroger’s stocks tumble 8% overnight.[1443] (Notice a pattern?)

Amazon is famously ruthless when it tries to expand its e-commerce empire. In 2009, Amazon noticed an up-and-coming online retail startup called Quidsi, which sold baby products on Diapers.com. Amazon sent an executive to have lunch with the Quidsi founders and offered to buy the company. The founders said no.[1440] But then Amazon started aggressi

Facebook started officially listing Amazon as a competitor in its annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).[1434]

Facebook is also threatened by Amazon’s expansion into video streaming and social media, which it kicked off by buying the video game live streaming service Twitch in 2014.[1431]

This means many companies are starting to move ad dollars toward Amazon because that’s where their consumers are. Plus, with Alexa being the biggest voice computing platform, more and more customers can just ask Alexa to buy something — bypassing Google and web browsers entirely.[1430]