Amazon Searches for Its Next Big Hit

livemint.com:

The team atop Amazon.com has been pushing for years to find what they call a “fourth pillar," an internal shorthand for the company’s next big hit. It is proving an elusive goal. The tech giant has invested billions of dollars into an array of endeavors across several industries—and stoked Wall Street’s interest along the way.

Over the years, when news broke that Amazon was entering a new arena, its stock price would rise and shares of potential competitors would drop, a sign that investors believed Amazon would reshape another corner of the business world. The first three pillars——each of them massive operations with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue—are its online retail marketplace, its Amazon Prime membership program and its cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services. The company’s core online shopping business, Prime and AWS account for almost 90% of the company’s sales.

With a fourth pillar, “we’re a completely different company," Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said at a conference last year. But nearly all its big bets in recent years—including forays into healthcare, in-person shopping, entertainment and hardware—so far haven’t turned into thriving, profitable new businesses. Some analysts and investors are starting to lose patience with what they see as Amazon’s scattershot efforts and the poor returns on many of its big swings, questioning whether the company still deserves its reputation for being capable of relentless and limitless expansion.