Quote:
Originally Posted by 6charlong
Amazon’s business model relies on their shareholders/board of directors allowing them to go on year after year without paying a single dollar in dividends. That works while their stock value keeps going up and their shareholders can take their profit in stock value, thus gaining the tax advantage of growing wealth over income. It seems to me that the model will max out someday when there is no longer anywhere for Amazon to expand so profitably, or alternatively, until Amazon becomes a true monopoly in the book business and are sued and broken up by the government’s regulators.
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Not all stocks pay dividends, some never do. It's perfectly normal for a growing company to reinvest all its earning into continuing expansion like Amazon is doing as well. Of course growth will max out at some point if Amazon is stupid and doesn't try to expand into new markets. That's why they added an mp3 store, an e-book store, the streaming video store, and their Android app store. The Kindle and Kindle Fire devices are part of that strategy too, and help boost profits from the digital content they sell. (It's also notable that Amazon has gained a near monopoly on e-ink devices in the US despite not being the first to market. They did a better job than Sony, and Sony lost.)
Even if Amazon does become a monopoly that, in and of itself,
is not illegal. What is illegal is abusing your monopoly position, for things like undercutting competitors to take over another market and gaining another monopoly that way. Or to abuse customers on pricing. But if a company becomes a monopoly naturally (the market gives it to them because they do a better job than others, they create a new market entirely, etc.) it's perfectly legal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cfrizz
In your own way you people are just as much dinasaurs as the price fix BPH-5. You refuse to be flexible, you refuse to change, and you are the minority. So stick with your eink machines til they all die, the rest of us will continue marching on happily reading on whatever devices we have that can display ebooks, play music, make phone calls etc.
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There are other reasons to want e-ink devices to innovate and the market for them grow. Those screens use vastly less power than LED/LCD screens, and if they can eventually get to where their refresh rate and colors are comparable, they would greatly benefit
all portable devices. So even if you think dedicated e-book readers are a dinosaur, you should still want e-ink to develop and grow. Someday it might make your tablet devices even more awesome. (For the record, I prefer tablets and don't even own an e-ink device, but I do hope the screens pan out as a replacement technology because of those benefits.)