The Core

Amazon is good at being an e-commerce company that sells things, but what it’s great at is making new e-commerce companies that sell new things.

The company calls this approach its “flywheel”: it takes the scale that can smother a typical multinational, and uses it to provide an ever-increasing momentum backing up its entire business. The faster the flywheel spins, and the heavier it is, the harder it is for anyone else to stop it.

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Perhaps the best example of that approach in action is the birth and growth of AWS (previously called Amazon Web Services).

AWS is large enough that in 2016 the company released the “Snowmobile”, a literal truck for moving data. The companies that work with AWS move so much information around that sometimes the internet simply cannot cope. So now, if you want to upload a lot of data to Amazon’s cloud, the company will drive a truck to your office, fill it with data, then drive it back. If you need to upload 100 petabytes – that’s roughly 5m movies in 4k with surround sound – it turns out there’s no quicker way to do it than driving it down the freeway at 75mph.