I was Amazon for quite some time, and also outside of Amazon trying to compete against them. The company is both decentralized and has a culture of delivering. While that sometimes has unintended consequences, the people there are quite aware that they can sometimes be an elephant in a china shop. There are practices in place to rein that in. Nonetheless, investigations like this book hardly ever give a balanced view.
By "balanced view," do you mean the one where Amazon lawyers attempt to erode the ever-growing list of credible reports outlining Amazon engaging in and encouraging the tactics outlined in the article/book?
From what I can tell, the article is remarkably spot on.
It begs the question, without government contracts[1], where would Amazon actually be? Would Amazon be out of business? Hmm... Makes you wonder.
Amazon employee here, seven years at the company so far. This is my personal opinion only:
I don't know that there are many articles I've read about Amazon that have a balanced view. I will say that many people who are anti-Amazon have this picture of Amazon as being more ruthless (and smarter) than it actually is.
For example, an Amazon seller can make the claim that Amazon used it's access to marketplace data to research info about their product sales and then compete with them. But as an insider I believe the reality is probably far more stupid: a seller who had their product "copied" by Amazon was likely just a middleman who was using a factory in China to make their product. The middleman is basically just extracting value from being a middleman. But most Chinese factories produce extra product on the side. Once they setup the toolchain and processes for building your product why not keep the assembly lines running a bit longer and produce a few thousand more copies of your product? Or maybe the factory keeps a big stockpile of the rejected product that was slightly bad quality, so they couldn't send it to the original middleman. And if you are this Chinese factory then why not sell this extra product (mixing in the lower quality rejects) directly to Amazon for Amazon to list as an Amazon Basic? The factory can make more money by cutting out the middleman, and some ignorant Amazon product acquisition worker will buy that stuff, not even realizing it is what it is. No "sensitive business information" needed. So "Amazon copied my product as an Amazon Basic" is probably way more dumb than it sounds.
Or the "Amazon copied my product idea or roadmap" claim from the article. Do you realize how many ideas there are floating around in Amazon when you have >1 million employees? Any idea you can come up with has already been suggested dozens of times by Amazon employees and was probably also requested by Amazon's own customers via support a couple thousand times. The only question is whether that idea is worth building now versus worth building later. And as it turns out when there is real demand for an idea there tends to be multiple people who start building that idea at the same time. In fact sometimes there are multiple teams within Amazon who start trying to build the same thing at the same time, and they didn't even know about each other. Often one team fails to build it while another team succeeds. The duplicated effort eventually gets sorted out, but it happens a lot.
This is the type of scenario that happens time and time again. It's fun to write a click attracting story about Amazon as this big brutal force when the reality is most likely much dumber than it seems.
As a former employee of a 100K+ person company, I've had these exact thoughts several times. I worked in acquisitions, and constantly was finding out that we were reinventing (or rebuying) the wheel internally in independent departments.
Amazon is the only company I know of that has to have contingency plans for blowing through the available local workforce, their treatment of people is that bad. I have been at the very bottom of society, and everyone chose to work somewhere else than an Amazon warehouse, including the local refuse recycling plant sorting putrid trash that paid less.
My friend worked at the Amazon warehouse in Scotland, it was hard work, but paid relatively well. He ris extremely hard worker. Exactly one time he got stomach flu, came in green barely standing and said he can't work. Was fired on spot.
Please do assuming that the original poster is acting in bad faith. I have seen a lot of reporting about disfavored organizations, and it is often unfair. I do not know if this reporter has done a good job or not but I have seen a fair number of anti-Amazon articles which basically attack Amazon for being successful.
The other problem with the article is it does not point out some obvious problems Amazon has. First, Amazon is expensive, and people can and do go else ware. Second, Amazon's retail side is mediocre. Amazon's retail web page is basically a product search engine. Outside of search, Amazon does very little work to help people find products they are interested in. Amazon also does almost no curation. This is why it is often hard to distinguish between good non-fiction books and books which spread disinformation. Third, a lot of Amazon initiatives have failed. Examples include Alexa (a giant money pit), the Fire Phone, Amazon's video game division (over a billion and basically only produced 1 moderate hit), Prime Video (a mediocre streaming competitor), etc. I have also heard Amazon has been destroying Twitch.
My main point is, the article paints Amazon as an unstoppable machine when in fact it is very fallible. It does some great things (AWS), some good things (Kindle), some OK things, and sometimes some very bad things.
I was sure you were going to get to the counterfeit and substandard goods problem, but you cited plenty of things in your comment, so I'll just add it.
Amazon's retail market is absolutely lousy with counterfeit goods, as well as products blindly imported from China (usually) which don't meet the standards required by regulation for such goods. This regularly causes injury, especially due to electrical fires, and Amazon has not been held to account for any of these practices.
Try heading to a street corner and selling counterfeit products: it's a crime, you'll be charged accordingly. Amazon has gotten away with this for more than a decade.
