Amazon: An Apples to Oranges Comparison to Craigslist

This is (one of) Amazon’s strategy. They’ve turned major cost line items into businesses and made them available to third parties.

This is Craiglist. They’ve been unbundled.

One is more vertical integration while the other is more horizontal decoupling. One is a doing $280B per year with 840,000 employees while the other is a 50 person wholly owned company doing $1B per year.

Both companies are successful. Still, they represent examples of the Opportunity and Threat cells of the old SWOT matrix.