What the Heck Is Amazon Up to Now?

Via Flickr user
Andy Melton

It’s a standard practice in strategic planning to think long and hard about what competitors and other players in an industry segment may be planning to do. Thus it’s not hard to imagine the bigwigs at Elsevier sitting in a conference room where the topic is the latest move by John Wiley; and Wiley at the same time is contemplating the strategy of Springer Nature. This kind of speculation is not peculiar to the for-profit publishers.

But what happens when the subject is Amazon, as mercurial and innovative as any company has ever been? How to get a handle on it? How to figure out its next move?