Sublime

EBay had an enormous advantage over the competition that it only then, under challenge, was coming to appreciate: a nicely balanced critical mass of sellers and buyers in each of hundreds of categories. This delicate balance had been achieved through the natural evolution of the eBay ecosystem, without the intervention of any guiding hand. If in an

Tightly controlling distribution allowed the company to make specific promises to customers on when they could expect their purchases to arrive. Amazon’s operating all of its own technology, from the supply chain to the website, allowed Russell Allgor and his engineers to create algorithms that modeled countless scenarios for each order so systems

Adam wasn’t bluffing, and the blitz against Industrious was on.

Galli was not technical, a significant drawback at a firm whose employees somewhat defensively viewed their workplace as a software-development company, not a retailer.

Any company, even a one-person home business, can piggyback on a computing operation that Amazon took years to assemble and fine-tune.

began working himself into American business circles.

By his own admission, Miller took an almost sadistic delight in pressuring book publishers to give Amazon more favorable financial terms. He ranked all of the European publishers by their sales and by Amazon’s profit margins on their books. Then he and his colleagues persuaded the lagging publishers to alter their deals and give Amazon better terms