People are willing to question the "obviously flawed" part. Lots of logistics people said that that Amazon was "obviously flawed" because you can't move goods independently to the consumer cheaper than you can move them in a truck to a store.
But that was always the case? At least as late as 2001, they had weekly milk delivery in Moncton, New Brunswick. It cost the same as milk in a store. You put your order in an envelope with some cash for next week. It wasn't just milk, you could get most non-frozen dairy that way.
Is it at all the same as Amazon? No. But it shows that you can be profitable delivering low value items right to peoples doorstep.
It certainly was not always the case, but I think people assumed that it would be the case going forward (and given that grocery delivery has not recovered, it probably still is the case in grocery).
Walmart was the established model for "best practices" in selling general goods for a long time. Now, the Walmart model is showing its weaknesses, which people assumed did not exist.
Logistics people don’t manage retail or grok overhead.
The part about Amazon that was questionable was the massive capital investments in infrastructure to facilitate 2 day delivery. LL Bean, Sears, HSN, etc all demonstrated that mail order was a thing. Prodigy (aka Sears) demonstrated Amazon like e-commerce in 1990.
Even so, they had to do things like FBA to make money. Walmart is a less sexy but much more efficient business.
If we are talking restaurants, human costs are around 1/3 of the total expense- the rest being rent and food.
I don't see how splurging on massive capital investments like machines winds up being cheaper than having a human do the food prep- humans are remarkably efficient at quality control, repetitive but flexible tasks (I.e. dealing with imperfect non-manufactured things like food items) and require little capital to get going (just basic training).
The only thing machines beat humans at in food is volume of high precision, highly controlled tasks- think producing bags of chips rather than prepared meals.
It seems like food startups are trying to jump straight to scale, hoping to prove out that eliminating some human jobs works- saving maybe 1/6 of their costs at best, rather than proving that a market exists for whatever product they are selling.
Amazon realized early on that technical excellence supports business excellence. Most businesses and governments have not yet come to that conclusion.
Cloud services should have come from HP, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, or any number of actual tech companies. It is an absurdity really that Amazon won the space.
All of those companies except Google listened to their dopey customers.
I remember playing with S3 and pitching early EC2 after reading a story about how the New York Times digitized their archives, a project my then employer was doing for our records at ridiculous expense. My director loved it, but legal shot it down for 100 reasons that turned out to be nonsense.
It really is weird. Granted I am very much a layman and have no true understanding behind cloud infrastructures, I've always find it really weird that Amazon of all companies won that race over more intertwined players.
People are willing to question the "obviously flawed" part. Lots of logistics people said that that Amazon was "obviously flawed" because you can't move goods independently to the consumer cheaper than you can move them in a truck to a store.
Turns out, you can.