Originally Posted by
whalesurfer
This was just an article and who knows what the future holds?
My extremely uneducated guess is that within 5-7 years Amazon will be doing most, if not all, of their domestic deliveries on their own.. They've been hiring IT managers from ups (and I believe dhl too?) left and right, apparently some of the it folks were very talented in their respective fields. Jeff Bezos is a brilliant and a ruthless entrepreneur, he'll try to excel at this too.
Call me crazy but I wouldn't be surprised if Fred Smith were to sell, let's say a 50% stake of FDX to Amazon and allocate part of his fleet to Amazon deliveries, at least during big holidays. He's about to retire and is looking for a way to secure FDX's legacy in the "new" commerce world..
Either way, presently FDX has very little exposure to Amazon, ups does. Almost every business venture Fred and Jeff have put their hands on turned into a success story. On the other hand, big brown has been "excelling" at shrinking the operation into oblivion for the short term payoffs and dividends.
We'll see what the future holds.. :-/
On the other hand, Silicon Valley is littered with masterminds who have failed. Steve Jobs had some flops as has Elon Musk, both of which had/have a couple dozen IQ points on Bezos.
So much of the buzz is that the tech press adores Bezos and Amazon on what amounts to political/philosophical grounds. The hipster class, who thinks that all APPs and streaming content...indeed internet access should be free applauds Bezos as all so progressive because Amazon makes little profit and Jeff's salary is so low, as if he "cares" about the "little guy". The stock price is all about potential as opposed to the current balance sheet, not unlike how climate change is based on computer models always talking about 50 years from now.
Many of these "experts" know little or nothing about shipping and even less about aviation. If you mentioned "slots" they'd say you were talking about putting more RAM in their home built PC. If you mention "hub" efficiencies they'd think racks of routers.
UPS and FDX have built and refined their systems over decades, populated by guys in the hard core trucking industry that aren't just going to roll over for the hipster dufus golden boy who thinks he's infallible. And there are other retail giants out there like Wal Mart who won't just secede the world to Jeff because all the pimple faced geeks say Bezos is going to rule the world.
Hype is sparkly and novel...business is brutal.