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You are correct, but note that one very key edge that Amazon used to as a competitive edge is no longer available to new entrants in the business. For the first 15 to 20 years of Amazon, they were able to be cheaper than their competitors due to the fact that sales tax only had to be collected in states where they had a nexus.

This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more customers to them which they intelligently plowed back into the business in building out their own network, no small feat of course.

A newer competitor would no longer have access to that simple sales tax advantage, and so would have to find something else to compel customers with. Barring that, Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy are tough to compete with because they already offer rock bottom pricing and they don’t have to invest in a ton of new infrastructure for logistics.

Not to mention the advantage of having investors willing to burn billions for a decade+ until you got into a dominant market position to finally become profitable. Not always easy to get access to that.

When Facebook was founded there was no Facebook. Now there is a Facebook.

When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea.

Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.

Except there was a Facebook and it was called MySpace. Facebook won because people enjoyed using it better.

yes, but the bar for better was much lower back then. if you released the original Facebook today it would be so obviously so much worse than the competitors it wouldn't get any traction.

When FB was founded there were:

  MySpace

  Friendster

  Whimit - Russians online (LOL)

and many other small examples. There was still AOL, MSN, etc. There was a time when they ruled.

The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even able to launch, is because the open permissionless web disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to launch on top of them. They’d cannibalize them just like Amazon cannibalizes sellers.

All of those had 10% of Facebook's current users, at best, and probably 1% of their spare cash.

Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should know that.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

> Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers form a community, then a free market of fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that specific product, and then partner with the delivery companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the package.

One thing that gets overlooked in this is returns.

One of the big draws of Amazon is easy returns.

Whenever you have decentralized fulfillment centers, returns become a huge pain, because the fulfillment center that is happy to take your money and ship you the product, doesn't want the liability of dealing with returns.

Amazon has also optimized returns (for itself) by making its sellers eat the cost of those returns, one way or another. That's not all that controversial, but when you consider what Amazon recommends people buy, it becomes obvious that they have no problem recommending garbage because they don't care if it gets returned. They won't eat that cost. They get the profit from the sale, then let everyone else work it out.