Rethink Marketing Podcast: Changing the Corporate Business Model to Suck Less
Will today’s big corporations — Amazon, Facebook, Netflix — also one day fail?
Nathan: I’m wondering about today’s big corporations, the Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix. 10 years from now, will they be going through this sort of challenge, or in 20 years from now, will they still be going through this sort of challenge?
Joseph: The answer is if they don’t suck today, they will suck one day.
I’ll give you two examples actually to prove it to you. First, Facebook already sucks. I think that’s not even debatable in terms of a lot of the challenges that they have faced and are finding themselves facing, from fake news and specifically what happened with the last election to privacy concerns. There’s just a number of missteps that the company continues to make. The reality that Facebook is just yesterday’s MySpace in the sense that young people are not on Facebook. If they are, they are increasingly spending less time there.
Then you’ve got Amazon on the other hand. Now, the thing about Amazon is that it was about two weeks before the book went to print. I saw a quote from Jeff Bezos. I could have kissed the guy. How crazy this whole conversation is this is after HQ2 was awarded to Virginia and of course New York, Long Island city. Now we know that they’ve pulled out of New York.
That just shows you the volatility and how Amazon maybe is not as strong as we thought that they were, but Bezos called an all hands meeting, and he said to his staff, “One day, Amazon will fail. One day, Amazon will go bankrupt. Your job is to delay that for as long as possible.”
That’s why I said I could just give the guy a bear hug, because if he can say that to Amazon or about Amazon, you tell me any company that is future proof or future protected or won’t go through the same, if not worse pains. Then of course, as I said, we look at what’s going on with Bezos lately, everything from personal matters specifically relating to his divorce, to this kind of mutiny, the state mutiny in a sense, and you think about what happens if he leaves the company. What happens to the company without Bezos at the helm? Suddenly, you realize that as I said, if it can happen to Amazon, it surely can happen to any company.