You can be comfortable in a big company. But you can also miss opportunities because they don’t look big enough.
Take Amazon.Com. They’re on track to bring in $500 billion this year. About half will be in merchandise sales. The other half will be in services of various kinds. The stock fell after earnings because the cloud unit projected slower growth, some of it driven by its own effort to help customers lower their cloud costs, some by the cost of adding AI software to AWS. Overall, Amazon stock is a buy.
My problem is Amazon has become such a sprawling business that some divisions are just too small to merit attention.
Take the Kindle book division. This is funny because Amazon started as a bookstore.
I like the Kindle. An e-book reader is lighter than almost any book. You can use it with the lights off. A Fire Tablet can cost just $40 and serve as a personal TV. You can get refurbished Kindle readers dirt cheap.
E-books make printed books seem an environmental disaster. E-books also save money. Amazon offers a $10/month library service called Kindle Unlimited. I consider it a bargain. It offers lots of e-books at $1 to $3.
But in all the efforts by some states to ban books and close libraries, you haven’t heard a word from Amazon. That’s because the Kindle business is so small, by Amazon standards, that the company would rather keep quiet than pursue an opportunity that might be controversial.
What if Amazon offered used readers, in bulk, to people in states that are banning books, and in school districts that are limiting what kids can read? What if it offered special deals on banned books, and brought titles to young people some of their “betters” are forbidding for them, to encourage reading?
It’s risky. Some governments might retaliate. But that’s one reason Kindle should have been spun out of Amazon some time ago. A spun-out Kindle would be less susceptible to that kind of blackmail. Texas might decide to tax Amazon deliveries, or restrict the company in other ways, if the folks running the Kindle stepped out of line. They couldn’t if Kindle were a separate company.
Amazon has been ignoring the Kindle for years. It’s ignoring books generally. As a result, independent bookstores are making a comeback. Barnes & Noble is making a comeback. That’s fine, but money is being left on the table. Money a rejuvenated Kindle could be picking up. And leadership on important questions a separate Kindle company could be delivering to America.
