Imagine a Covid-19 lockdown without ecommerce. Magically, Amazon’s reputation before some politicians have improved significantly across U.S. and Europe as without Amazon, most might have struggled to execute their quarantine and social distancing strategies. Expect fundamental redesigns in the architecture of markets, post Covid-19.
Indeed, tech has won the hearts of many by providing critical infrastructures which have helped nations. Amazon offered grants to small businesses before governments. Amazon ramped down on profiteers before attorney generals. And Amazon prioritized essential goods even before governments could articulate strategies.
America runs on Amazon these days. By the time this pandemic is over, it is all going to be the United States of Amazon. Operational fluidity and peerless visioning process have won. Jeff Bezos runs a big part of America right now: Amazon is “calling up 100,000 troops, extending grants to small businesses, prioritizing essential goods, and cracking down on profiteers.” What again do you need a government for?
The world needs to educate some politicians on the balance technology brings. Sure, while there is a need for better regulation, yet, we must also understand that there is a fundamental advantage that comes with size. Without size, Amazon would not have executed this current playbook. This is not to write that we need only big firms!
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The biggest deal right now is that Amazon cannot find enough workers to serve customers – and is no more accepting new customers on some of its product lines. Now, Amazon has a challenge: you must find workers and the politicians can help.
Africa needs bigger companies with capacities to fill the voids left by governments. Amazon is serving America big time, and Africa needs a blessing of that level. The promises of politicians are opportunities of markets. Big is not evil – we just need to ensure fair play by all.
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Unfortunately back home a lot of activities had to be halted. Students from Primary to Tertiary levels are majorly at home, except for a very small number of schools that cater for those from the higher income brackets. I don’t really know how much our E-commerce companies are able to help at this point.
You are right on the school part. I wrote about ecommerce, not education. Education requires broadband. We now know that NUC/TEFFUND/VCs have not digitized the schools despite all the plans. Ecommerce companies are not education companies. Here on Tekedia, we are working with professionals who can afford mobile internet on our programs via Tekedia Mini-MBA https://www.tekedia.com/mini-mba-2/
Maybe if there’s no Amazon, no politician would have contemplated total lockdown, certain decisions are only permissible when there are possible alternatives. Again, without aircrafts to fly millions of people daily, we might not be witnessing a widespread pandemic within such a short time across the globe. In other words, some things make others a possibility.
As for Africa needing big firms, you start by expanding the thinking capabilities of average Africans, because if anything big is automatically seen as threat, and then treated with contempt and envy; it makes it difficult to create big corporations. Size matters, no matter how great small businesses are doing, they remain small businesses; so also their capacity to fund big things.
The presence of big corporations doesn’t mean the disappearance of small businesses, rather the former help to sustain the latter. They are not mutually exclusive. From Toyota to Apple, Amazon to Boeing; they all have thousands of companies in their supply chain. But what the short-sighted people see are the behemoths, and not countless smaller ones that feed on the behemoths.
Big investments on infrastructure happen only when you have big corporations, small businesses cannot do that.