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Achieving such successes takes hard work: the company has a reputation for intensity and a demanding culture. It also requires a willingness to spend. “It’s very easy for a large company to get trapped into not wanting to place too many bets and fail too often,” says Jeff Wilke, who leads Amazon’s e-commerce business. It is a trap he is determined to avoid. A massive expansion of Amazon’s e-commerce services has led it to lose money in two of the past five years. It is also pouring $3bn into an attempted expansion into India.
取得这些成就需要付出艰辛的努力：这家公司勇挑重任和精益求精的文化已名声在外。此外还需要有投资的意愿。亚马逊电商业务负责人杰夫·威尔克（Jeff Wilke）表示：“大公司非常容易裹足不前，不想下太多赌注，惧怕失败太多。”这是他决心要绕开的陷阱。亚马逊电商服务的大规模扩张导致过去五年中出现了两次年度亏损。为努力扩张印度市场，亚马逊还在投资30亿美元。
Some bets have failed. The Fire Phone,which Amazon launched in 2014, flamed out. The idea that it could be used to recognise,and find a seller of, any product it saw turned out to be far more interesting to Amazon than to its customers, who preferred simple capabilities available from other phones.
一些冒险已经以失败告终。亚马逊在2014年推出的“Fire Phone”已偃旗息鼓。它可以用来识别和找到任何产品的卖家。相对其客户，这个想法对亚马逊来说更有吸引力。客户们只希望手机有一些简单的功能。这在其他手机上就可以实现。
Amazon’s successes have come from finding ways to spend money that bring increasing returns. Both AWS and the e-commerce business benefit from economies of scale. But they are also platforms that benefit from “network effects”—the more people buy from them, the better they get. As more firms use AWS, more developers know how to use it, giving Amazon more data with which to optimise it, which makes it more attractive in its turn. More shoppers on the Amazon site make it more alluring to third-party sellers, which increases the range of goods it can offer,which attracts more shoppers.
亚马逊的成功基于找到了可以带来更多回报的投资方式。 AWS和电商业务不但受益于规模经济，这两个平台也受益于“网络效应” - 从他们那里购物越多，他们就受益更大。随着更多的公司使用AWS，更多的开发者了解如何利用它，提供给亚马逊更多的数据优化它，进而使它更具吸引力。亚马逊网站上更多的购物者使其对第三方卖家更具魅力，从而增加了可提供的商品范围，进而吸引更多的购物者。
Alexa shows some signs of becoming a similar platform, though these are early days. Makers of cars, thermostats and other hardware can build Alexa into their gear.Alexa already has more than 10,000 “skills”, similar to smartphone apps, that turn wishes into commands. The more skills and Alexa-powered devices there are, the more appealing the digital assistant becomes to consumers, which means a bigger market for new skills.
Alexa显示出成为类平台的迹象，尽管这些尚处早期阶段。汽车，温控器和其他硬件制造商可以集成Alexa到他们的设备里. Alexa已经有10,000多项“技能”，这类似于智能手机的应用程序，将想法转化为指令。技能越多，有Alexa功能的设备越多，数字助手对消费者就越有吸引力，对新技术而言，这意味着更大的市场。
Divisible only by itself
只有本身可分割
One of Amazon’s most successful offerings has been its Prime subscription. Originally this just offered free shipping, but the company has added more and more new perks—two-hour shipping, for instance, or free and sometimes exclusive streaming video—to encourage people to stump up the annual subscription ($99 in America). The idea, Mr Bezos told investors last year,is to make Prime “such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”
亚马逊最成功的产品之一是Prime会员服务。最初它只提供免费送货服务，但公司已经增加了越来越多的新福利，例如两小时到货否则免费的服务，以及间或提供的独家流媒体视频，这些都鼓励普罗大众为年度会员服务买单（在美国需支付99美元）。贝佐斯先生去年告诉投资者，他想使Prime成为物超所值的产品-不成为会员是不负责任的表现。“
That is costly. In 2017 Amazon is expected to spend $4.5bn on television and film content, roughly twice what HBO will spend. But it has a big payoff. Users who subscribe to Prime spend at least three times as much as Amazon shoppers who don’t subscribe, estimates Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley.In part this is a selection effect;it makes more sense for heavy shoppers to subscribe. But it also seems that, having subscribed, they shop yet more heavily, knowing that they incur no further shipping costs when they do so. Mr Nowak reckons the company had 72m Prime members last year, up by 32% from 2015.
这样做成本高昂。2017年，亚马逊预计在电视和电影内容上投资45亿美元，大约是HBO支出的两倍。但它将斩获颇丰。摩根士丹利的Brian Nowak估计，Prime会员用户的消费额至少三倍于非会员。部分是由于选择效应。对于购物狂来说，会员资格更有意义。但似乎成为会员之后，他们购物甚至更多，因为很清楚这样做不会产生额外的运送费用。诺瓦克认为，该公司去年的Prime会员人数达到了7，200万，比2015年增长了32％。
As well as focusing on customers, Amazon has proved rather good at treating itself as one; making something it wants and then selling it to others. Amazon wanted the benefits cloud computing offered, and having provided them for itself, decided to spread the costs by providing them for others through AWS. The customer’s eyeview was a boon; Amazon understood the needs of startups better than established computing firms could. Last year AWS’s revenue reached $12bn, up by more than 150% since 2014.
除专注于客户，亚马逊证明将自己视为客户对待也成果斐然; 生产自己想要的东西，然后把它卖给别人。亚马逊希望享受云计算提供的便利，并成功为自己提供了此项服务。之后它决定通过AWS对外提供云计算服务以摊低成本。客户视角是公司的福音; 相比现有计算机公司，亚马逊更了解初创公司的需求。去年，AWS的收入达到120亿美元，比2014年增长了150％多。
Allowing others to use the company’s e-commerce platform, warehouses and other services is an even bigger business.Fees from sellers around the world who use Amazon reached $23bn in 2016, nearly twice what they were in 2014.
允许外部使用公司的电商平台，仓库和其他服务甚至成就了更大的生意。世界各地的销售商使用亚马逊的支出在2016年达到230亿美元，几乎是2014年的两倍。
Some of the company’s current investments may deliver similar benefits. It is testing a grocery in Seattle that lets shoppers buy items without stopping at a cash register. This may prove a model for future Amazon shops. But it seems just as likely that the automatic-checkout technology will be sold to other retailers. It is also planning a $1.5bn hub for cargo planes in Kentucky.At the very least, that will help meet demand in busy periods and give it more bargaining power when dealing with vendors such as UPS and FedEx. But Amazon’s fleet could one day be part of a logistics operation that rivals them.
公司目前的一些投资可能带来类似的利益。它正在西雅图的一家超市进行测试，购物者选购商品后无需在收银机处停留。或将证明这是未来亚马逊商店的样板。但是，自动结帐技术似乎也可以出售给其他零售商。它还计划在肯塔基建造价值15亿美元的货机枢纽。最低限度，这将有助于满足市场旺季的需求，同时在与UPS和联邦快递等供应商打交道时提供更好的议价能力。但亚马逊自己的车队有一天可能成为其物流运营的一部分，并与其他对手展开竞争。
Such experiments raise a tantalising prospect for shareholders. AWS provides the tools for companies to do business online;Amazon is a dominant online platform for selling digital and physical goods.Eventually, the company could offer infrastructure for all kinds of commerce, online and off. It already has one of the things that modern business most desires: data. It knows what its customers buy, listen to and watch; it has a good sense of how they respond to prices. The more data Amazon has, the better it can boost sales via its site through recommendations, advertisements,new services, products and more.That would make it ever more difficult for rivals to catch up.
这些实验给股东们展现了诱人的前景。 AWS为众多公司线上业务提供了工具; 亚马逊是销售数字和实体商品的主要在线平台。最终，亚马逊公司可以为各种商业形式提供基础设施,不论是线上还是线下。它已经拥有了现代企业最渴望得到的宝藏之一：数据。它知道客户在购买什么，听些什么和看些什么; 这对如何定价极具意义。亚马逊的数据越多，它在网站上就可以通过推荐，广告，新服务，新产品等更好地提升销量。通过这种方式，竞争对手将更难与之匹敌。
Mr Bezos claims, as a corollary to thinking only of customers, never to think of rivals.However, the list of current and possible competitors that Amazon is required to include in its annual filings is long and getting longer. It ranges from retailers and search engines to film producers and, as of last year, logistics and advertising firms. Sir Martin Sorrell, boss of WPP, the world’s biggest advertising company, might seem to have little to fear from a firm which last year made an estimated $2bn from advertising. But Amazon is a new intermediary between brands and customers, one which could conceivably use its direct relationships and stacks of data to cut out the ad-agencies altogether. “What worries you when you go to bed at night and wake up in the morning?” Sir Martin said in a recent conference call. “It’s Amazon.”
贝佐斯声称，只为客户着想的必然结果是永远不需顾及竞争对手。但是，在年报中，亚马逊必须列出的现在或是未来的竞争对手清单已经很长，并且会变得更长。例如，从零售商，搜索引擎到电影制片商，以及从去年开始出现的物流和广告公司。世界上最大广告公司WPP的老板马丁·索雷尔爵士原本不必惊慌失措，毕竟亚马逊公司去年的广告业务估计只有20亿美元。 但亚马逊是品牌和客户之间的新媒介，可以想象它会利用其直接联系和海量数据彻底挤掉广告公司。马丁爵士在最近的电话会议中提到 “晚上入睡时抑或凌晨醒来时什么事让你忧心忡忡？是亚马逊”。