Comment by intalentive 6 hours ago
I read "stock buybacks in 1982" as shorthand for "financialization and short-term thinking at the expense of long-term gains", which certainly happened across corporate America and Britain starting with Reagan and Thatcher.
Amazon is a dystopian nightmare of a company. Amazon took losses in order to decimate their competition. Their business model you hype is evil af. They have to have people planning for when they run out of local workers their warehouses are so bad. They allow in fake fuses and tons of other fake products because they are cool with the risk to peoples lives. Instead of giving you decent search results they sell ad spots.
So yes, Amazon represents 'good management thinking' post 2010. But not corporate thinking pre 1980s that, you know, build the US/UK to the positions they were able to cost on up until now.
In tech it was the switch from creative corporatism, which is focused on opportunities, invention, and infrastructure, to extractive corporatism and oligarchy, which are focused on scams, exploitation, and the creation of rigid hierarchies of privilege.
We're now in the end stage of the latter in the US.
The US still plays at invention - or rather a few of its oligarchs do - but it's far, far behind what's happening in other countries.
Honestly this sounds like a narrative in your head a lot more than something that is happening in actual reality.
You state that as if it is a fact, but from what I see the tech industry has engaged in the longest term corporate strategies I have ever seen. Amazon took losses for the better part of two decades before it showed a profit, and public markets would never even fund a venture like SpaceX.