Quidsi's Competitive Intelligence By Jeff Bezos

The year was 94’, and the decision of one ordinary Wall Street businessman to quit his retail job became the turning point of online retailing era. This was disruptive innovation at its most relatable fineness, evolving from a simple online bookseller, to the Amazon with the $140 billion market value we know today.
Undeniably, a pushing factor of development is the innovative founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. Bezos has initiated a notoriously confrontational interaction culture within the core of his company. In the instance of one oversight in e-mail marketing, Bezos threatened to shut down the whole channel: “We can build a $100 billion company without sending out a single f------ e-mail.” He had his fair share of tantrums, but it was exactly
Aside from the usual competition with Wal-Mart as a shop, Apple as a device manufacturer, and IBM in the data industry, especially notable was a Jersey City company named Quidsi (Diapers.com) which sold basic gear for new parents. In 2009, Amazon approached Quidsi, pitching their intent to purchase the start-up. After Quidsi’s refusal, Amazon launched its assault, lowering their own prices on baby products up to 30%, manipulated accordingly to Quidsi prices. Eventually, this onslaught slowed Quidsi revenues, and they had no choice but to consider selling. Wall-Mart, with its concerns about online retail competitiveness, too approached Quidsi for a buyout offer. Yet after strategic and timely manipulation, in 2010, Amazon acquired Quidsi for 60 million less than what Wal-Mart had offered. However ethically debatable, this gradual trend of talent merging is almost essential to building a sustainable ecosystem in a smart city, as depicted in the Porter’s 5 Forces Model of Competitive Strategy. The threat of new entrants largely influence the existing market economy of already established industries, and Amazon was no
Worldwide software revenue increased 4.8% from 2012-2013, totalling 407.3 billion at the end of the year. The multiplication of existing platforms contributed greatly to this revenue growth. We used to only have PCs, servers, and supercomputers. Now we have everything from GPS to PDAs, adding to the growing use of wireless technologies. The advent of these online networking opportunities also gives rise to overseas job allocation, much more easily and legally contracted than physical labour. In the service sector, software has arisen as mostly consumer friendly, and focuses on convenience by bringing developments from the cloud. Banking, purchasing, and downloading can all be done within the vicinity of your home in your pyjamas. In addition, Amazon continues to make contributions to Linux Kernel and Xen, somewhat akin to open source projects, tending toward major bug fixes. Yet the past six months has seen AWS reboot twice its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) servers , mostly because AWS uses different custom versions of Xen across different regions, implying a variety of open source codes. When a software provider with a scale such as Amazon undergoes such fluctuation, customers have no choice to reboot, and they need to do so without reason, since AWS can’t simply announce their vulnerability. This is where the contention lies, as with most software platforms. For most