Amazon's Greatest Weapon: Jeff Bezos's Paranoia - WSJ.com

Excerpt from another timely Amazon business profile; perhaps eBay should have joined IBM in renting buses for competitive banner ads at the AWS conference in Las Vegas this week

"This sets up a nice set of network effects for the company: Third-party items expand Amazon's selection, which attracts more consumers to its site, which in turn makes Amazon more attractive for other third-party sellers. At the same time, as Amazon claims more third-party sellers, more customers and more sales, it wins further leverage over shippers like UPS and FedEx, further driving down its infrastructure costs-which, once again, feeds greater sales. It wouldn't be crazy to guess that at some point, third-party sales will become Amazon's main business, with its own goods just a slice of a much larger company that is mostly about e-commerce infrastructure, not e-commerce itself."

Amazon's Greatest Weapon: Jeff Bezos's Paranoia - WSJ.com