Excellent piece of reporting in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. But I disagree with this take-away:
Amazon’s goal, these people say, is to one day haul and deliver packages for itself as well as other retailers and consumers—potentially upending the traditional relationship between seller and sender.
Some executives refer to the initiative as “Consume the City,” a nod to the company’s plans to build a massive delivery network that could eventually compete with such partners as UPS, according to people familiar the matter.What is suggested in the WSJ piece -- and baldly asserted elsewhere -- is that Amazon is intent on taking down UPS and FedEx.
This is a 1970s notion of survival of the fittest and winner-take-all capitalist competition.
With more time than I have this morning, I would argue that what is going on is innovative problem-solving, gap filling, exploration, and adaptation within a rapidly evolving transformation of retail... and all its supportive systems.
Everyday across the planet in every sector I know anything about there is an extraordinary range of coopetition...cooperation, collaboration, joint venturing, and more between intense competitors. This is especially true in supply chain.
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