Thanks to its ugly spat with book publishers, Amazon has lately been cast as the abominable boogeyman of American commerce.
As hundreds of authors took up arms against the giant, The New Republic declared in a cover article this fall that "Amazon Must Be Stopped," insisting that the company's unbounded retail ambitions would end up "cannibalizing the economy."
But there's another theory about Amazon's future, one for which evidence began to mount this year: Despite fears of Amazon's growing invincibility, the company's eventual hegemony over American shopping is not assured. It might not even be likely.
That's not just because investors began to question the company's aggressive spending this year, or because its big new thing, the Fire Phone, turned out to be about as unwelcome as the flu.