Amazon + Whole Foods = Greater Than Sum of Parts

All the talk of Amazon buying Whole Foods revolves around Amazon getting its tentacles even more into the grocery business.

Talk about underestimating Amazon. Two articles I suggest reading to understand how Amazon thinks: Why Amazon is Eating the World and Amazon’s New Customer.

Amazon is a different breed of company. Why? Its service-oriented architecture (SOA) structure. The Wikipedia definition of SOA: “services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network.” In short, autonomous components that know how to talk to each other. At first glance, this would not seem revolutionary. Plenty of big businesses already have silos that never talk to each other and compete against each other for budget and credit. Sure I am sarcastic, but how does Amazon do SOA?

Amazon’s silos service customers internally and externally. They start out with an existing large internal customer, but they are designed to be used externally as well. Their warehouses are not only for Amazon merchants but any third party who needs order fulfillment. Selling through amazon.com is not a requirement. AWS is similar. It was created to power parts of the website but became a product to rent out.

Most companies build a product or provide a service. Imagine what happens when all the core activities are profit centers by using them internally and externally. How you create a product, service, or function changes. It is building a business that can thrive in a world of constant change. Instead, we have companies creating innovation labs whose outputs will have to be bolted onto existing processes and systems…unsuccessfully.

As Ben Thompson points out, Whole Foods is not about getting into the grocery business. It is taking the Whole Foods logistics, re-architecting it so it can be used internally for Whole Foods, but any other industry/vertical that buys food whether its hotels, restaurants, assisted-living homes, schools, and so forth. They will be competing against Sysco and U.S. Foods.

We thought Uber’s was in the logistics business because of UberEats and flower deliveries. However, that is small potatoes compared to Amazon when it wants to do everything from payment (money logistics) to drone deliveries and everything in between.