Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. So much money is sloshing through Amazon these days, keeping it balanced to the point where you don't let it accumulate (generating profit) or flow to fast (generating loss) has got to be scary complex. At every large company I've worked at there are things on the balance sheet that are "tunable" by management which helps with this. It was a running joke inside Network Appliance that we always beat expectations by $.01 cent per share. Of course until you didn't and that usually meant that what ever mechanisms you used for tuning your cash flow didn't have enough dynamic range to cover the change that quarter.
Amazon then, being a services, merchandising, payment processor conglomeration then has to be crazy hard to manage cashflow in any meaningful way.
Amazon then, being a services, merchandising, payment processor conglomeration then has to be crazy hard to manage cashflow in any meaningful way.