Amazon Is Ripe For Disruption:
Amazon, the great disintermediator that put a spanner — in fact, a set of 25 spanners in a handy case, yours for just $9.99 — in the businesses of many a retailer, is going to face exactly the same fate if it doesn’t start to address its weaknesses soon, particularly in the area of publishing.
Yet GigaOm knows that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets more kudos, but challenges loom:
It’s been a good year for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. In November, Fortune Magazine named him its Business Person of the Year for 2012 and now Harvard Business Review taps him the second-best CEO in the universe in an update to its original rankings posted in 2010.
And Reuters has got a little piece about how Google’s book scanning project got Bezos on the trajectory that ended with the Kindle devices. Analysis: Amazon, Google on collision course in 2013:
When Amazon.com Inc CEO Jeff Bezos got word of a project at Google Inc to scan and digitize product catalogs a decade ago, the seeds of a burgeoning rivalry were planted. The news was a “wake-up” call to Bezos, an early investor in Google.
Also mentions Amazon’s foray into ads, and searching vs. shopping strategies of both.