Sure, but ”They built a very successful business and uses that to squeeze publishers“ is a very different explanation than “Amazon sells books at a loss”.

The idea that Amazon subsidises book prices or generally sells everything at a loss is based on a flawed understanding of the early years of Amazon.

That hasn’t been true for more than a decade. (Why be in a business you can’t make money on?) Amazon have, for a long time, invested more or less all their profits into new business lines on the promise that they could easily “flip a switch” and start making billions in profits. (They started doing that a few years ago after bad financial results.)

XMPP wouldn’t be around even if Google never interacted with it. It died because that category of product died.

Who is going to pay for evening deliveries for households?

“Performance goals” sound good on paper but don’t work and would introduce extra cost. Delivery time would require all post to be tracked, which would take extra time (=cost) at delivery. To track successful deliveries, you’d need a complaints procedure that’s simple enough to be widely used, and staffed well enough to check up on a subset of complaints so to not lead to unfair punishment.

Instead of all this extra complexity that would make posties lives worse, we could just do what we did before - pay them reasonably well and hire enough of them so they can do their job properly. 🤷🏼‍♂️