But if you are making less than pennies on the dollar, was it ever a success anyway? Having users and traction is not success. Plenty of companies get both users and traction, all they have to do is tolerate negative profits...
I'm not sure it's that useful to compare a <10 person startup to the world's largest online retailer, with revenue increasing by leaps and bounds every quarter, a quarter-billion active customers, and approaching $100 billion a year in net annual sales.
Bezos is choosing to reinvest $$$ in business rather than report it as profits. So far it's been a very wise choice.
Back on the topic at hand, I should add that it's sad to see this happen to DrawQuest, and it's very decent of Chris to post this for us to read.
I'm guessing the OP is talking about the PAST of Amazon, not the present. They ran for many years at a huge loss in order to capture the online retailing market, and didn't provide any returns for many, many years. Arguably, it worked.
Amazon is somewhat of a different story; Amazon is enduring small profits by choice in a bid for the future, and investors feel like they see that future, that tremendous potential.
The way they are playing it, IMO Amazon is still neither a success nor a failure. Their story is still being written, as they position themselves for whatever move they have been preparing for the last decade.
Discussing Amazon's business model is always an interesting topic. The first time I heard about that Amazon made no profit was from the news telling that they had to increase the free shipping criteria to be $35 instead of $25. Basically, they cannot afford to keep the $25 promise, which may lose some customers foreseeably.
Of course, Amazon does a lot of good and successful things, such as running such a huge ecommerce website to fulfill and meet so many customers needs, helping online business to sell, keeping their executives rich and making their employees job secure, including the stock holders happy, etc. And they are also investing into the technology side of the business and expanding into the cloud technology in early years. But how successful is it for AWS?
All of these cannot avoid an issue that their business model was going a wrong direction for many years to reach today's stage and further. So the article below shows that they are going to change their direction and stopping the effort to replace or shorten the supply chain by offering all kinds of services which exhaust their resources and lose focusing:
Amazon’s Future Is Not in Selling Stuff — And That’s a Good Thing
