Being involved in being acquired twice Fairchild bought by Loral then Loral by Lockheed Martin ( the rumor was the combined company would
be called Lowmoral), it is always at the end of the day the bean counters or a group of large investors. PoLTE was sold to QualComm for dimes on the dollars because a VC firm wanted their money out quickly. A lot of young workers were snookered as they were sweet talked in taking stock instead of higher salaries.
Amazon did not do anything "wrong" and they did not do anything that is not common in publicly held companies. DPR was losing money and probably the bean counters didn't see any way it could turn it around - it was time to get it off the books.
People always get screwed in these situations. There is a euphoria at DPR as a select number saved their jobs. But the books have not closed yet on how Gear Patrol is going to turn a business that was not supporting itself into one that is. The DPR saga is not over, by far.
It's ironic that Amazon wastes money by delivering three products on the same day, in different packaging, from different vehicles, and still believes they can save lot$a money by closing an unprofitable website.
Separate shipments arrive faster and many items are not eligible for consolidated shipping.
“Combined” shipping would be a nightmare to implement and manage.
Amazon makes tons of money selling overpriced Prime memberships that promise expedited shipping on overpriced stuff.
Citizen Kane bragged that he could lose a million dollars a year on his newspaper for the next sixty years, and I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos can outdo him (even adjusted for inflation). However, Jeff Bezos already loses money on a newspaper, and apparently he's not interested in also continuing to lose money on a website.
That request is the same as anyone requesting you to provide sources that DPR was profitable. But even if it was profitable, if it wasn't generating returns above what the cash value of DPReview would return by simply parking the funds in a safe bank account somewhere then it is a no-brainer for the shareholders to at least consider jettisoning the business.
Whether it was losing money or not, Amazon's publicly available balance sheet clearly shows DPReview was a microscopic sized part of Amazon's assets.
That's not the point. The point is the person who posted that probably has no idea whether they were losing money or not. I see far too much of that on the internet and it is really annoying. Don't say things like you know when you don't know.
My company decided to quit publishing new titles under one of our imprints. This imprint was for aviation and aviation history. I ended up on a forum for buffs that like that stuff, and there was a thread speculating on our demise. The crap people were posting as fact that was so far off base it was laughable. That thread is seared into my brain to this day, and when I see people post stuff like they know, when they really don't know, I say prove it.